Hiroshi Soga: The Butsudan Painting and the Cave of Lascaux

Hiroshi Soga transforms traditional butsudan altar panels into poetic paintings where grids, fragments, and flowers echo cycles of life and impermanence. Guided by the ideas of “Lascaux” and kihai, this article explores how his work invites us to sense an unseen presence. If you have questions for the artist, Art San Gallery will be pleased to pass your message along to Hiroshi Soga.

Unseen by Hiroshi Soga

When I first met Hiroshi Soga, the evocation of Lascaux created an immediate connection between us. Whenever I asked him about his technique or his aesthetic, he would often reply simply: “Lascaux.” At first this answer seemed both delightful and enigmatic. It took me some time to understand that it was a conceptual key to his art. To reach that key, I had to turn to etymology — and etymology can be playful, especially when Japanese words and concepts resist direct equivalents in French or English.

A few weeks later, I was sitting quietly in Soga’s studio. Outside, water fell into a pond where carp swam lazily; before me stood one of his paintings. He told me it had been painted on the panel of a butsudan (仏壇), the traditional Buddhist household altar. Back home, when I began writing about Soga, I realized that a biographical approach would not suffice. I had to begin with the painting I had seen. I drafted my impressions from memory — the colors, the threads, the fragments. Yet when I returned to the studio, I noticed that I had inserted details belonging to other works of his. I had carried fragments across paintings, confusing one memory with another. In hindsight, this too belongs to Soga’s “Lascaux” concept — the way perception exceeds what is strictly given, how memory and anticipation intermingle with presence.

Later, when our conversation returned to his art, he once again evoked “Lascaux,” and alongside it he repeated the word 気配 (kehai, read here as kihai). This Japanese term designates a subtle presence sensed without being directly visible. It is notoriously difficult to translate, but French aesthetics offer two useful distinctions: the non-vu (what exists but is not seen) and the invu (what has not yet been seen). Together, these categories illuminate the way Soga’s art works — holding together the hidden and the emergent, the remembered and the unexpected.

The cave of Lascaux, discovered in 1940 by four adolescents, embodies this dialectic with clarity. Its walls, covered with horses, aurochs, bison, and stags, carried for over 17,000 years a visual world hidden in darkness. For millennia these images existed, but they were unseen — the non-vu. Their presence was real, enduring, untouched by human eyes, yet suspended in invisibility. When the children lit their torches, the images shifted into the invu — not-yet-seen until that precise moment. Animals leapt from the walls as if waiting for human eyes across geological epochs. What had endured immobile in darkness became sudden revelation.

For the Paleolithic artists themselves, these categories already applied. The non-vu was the vitality of the animals — breath, speed, power — invisible forces impossible to capture with the eye yet palpable in movement. The invu was the projection of desire and future action: animals invoked but not yet encountered, hunts imagined but not yet realized. Lascaux thus inscribed both memory and anticipation, absence and revelation, into the same gesture.

For the paleontologists who later studied the cave, the non-vu lay in the hidden layers of pigment and gesture: traces of scaffolding, sequences of application, overlapping superpositions invisible to the naked eye. Technologies revealed charcoal lines and microscopic residues. Yet an invu remained — the unanswered questions: Why these animals? What rituals accompanied the act of painting? What meanings have yet to be uncovered? Each analysis reveals new fragments, always pointing toward what has not yet been seen.

For us today, Lascaux is again paradoxical. The true cave is closed to protect it, hidden once more in darkness. What we see are replicas, photographs, reconstructions. The authentic images have returned to the non-vu, while the invu persists in future possibilities: new interpretations, new technologies of imaging, discoveries yet to come. The cycle continues — concealment, revelation, concealment again.

Soga’s art resonates within this very rhythm. His butsudan composition is organized by a grid of fine black threads stretched vertically and horizontally, dividing the surface into compartments. As he says, these threads “sometimes appear like antennas reaching out beyond, or like vessels and nerves within the painting, circulating information and energy.” Inside the compartments, collaged newspapers, printed textures, and kanji appear: 水 (water), 火 (fire), 木 (wood), 土 (earth), 金 (metal), 月 (moon), 日 (sun). These signs recall the cosmological order of elements. He mentioned that the faded hues came from newspapers about Shōzō Tanaka (田中正造), the pioneering Japanese environmentalist — so the colors themselves carried an ecological memory. In some compartments, delicate flowers surface beneath the threads, fragile emblems of life unfolding quietly yet insistently.

But order is unsettled. Blue drops scatter like rain nourishing the flowers; white drips cascade downward, indifferent to the grid, like time itself leaving traces. The painting becomes an allegory of the cycle of life: rain, flowering, decay, renewal. Structures of order are always touched by accident, impermanence, transformation.

This openness recalls Gutai, the movement that shaped Soga’s artistic career through his encounter with Shōzō Shimamoto. Yves Millet in his essay on Gutai explains it succinctly: “When the members of the group chose the word ‘concrete’ (gutai), their first intention was to distinguish themselves both from figurative and from abstract painting. (…) Gutai art does not transform or denature the material but gives it life. (…) If we leave the material as it is, presenting it just as it is, then it begins to tell us something and to speak in a powerful voice.” Soga extends this ethos. As he says: “The final stage of production is never complete. A falling leaf, the trace of rain, or the slow work of time may intervene and become part of the piece. This is not about negligence, but about aligning with the natural course of things.”

When placed upon a butsudan, this resonance deepens further. Traditionally, the altar is the dwelling place of unseen presences — ancestors, Buddhas — beings whose existence is felt rather than seen. By painting on it, Soga transforms the butsudan into an artistic altar where invisible forces — cosmic, ecological, ancestral — circulate through grids, flowers, drips, and fragments.

His work thus joins three legacies: the Paleolithic artists of Lascaux, who inscribed what the eye could not see; the Gutai pioneers, who opened art to the unpredictable event of matter and life; and the Japanese concept of kihai, where presence is both hidden reality and future emergence. In Soga’s hands, art itself becomes a cycle of life — holding the unseen, revealing the not-yet-seen, and accepting the perpetual transformations of time.

Let us look once again at the kanji within the composition, and linger on their layered meaning.
In the upper register, we encounter the cosmological sequence: 日 (sun), 月 (moon), 木 (wood), 火 (fire), 土 (earth), 金 (metal), and 水 (water). Together they echo the ancient order of the gogyo (五行), the five elements, expanded here with the luminaries of sun and moon — a cosmology of circulation and balance.
In the middle zone, larger inscriptions appear: 久しく (long, enduring), 人類 (humankind), 和 (harmony), 保 (preserve, protect), but also 命 (life), 大地 (great earth), and 平和 (peace). These characters root the cosmic cycle in human responsibility, linking endurance, preservation, and balance with the fate of people and the earth itself.
Finally, in the lower section, more intimate wishes unfold: 心安らかに (with a tranquil heart), 長寿 (longevity), and 健康 (health). Here the register shifts inward, invoking the cycle of individual existence, from the serenity of the heart to the hope for long life.

Perhaps here, in Hiroshi Soga’s art, lies the meaning of Lascaux for us today.

Arnaud Quentin de Coupigny