William Kentridge is known for his hand-drawn animations that evoke the quaint charms of the silent film era while unflinchingly observing the brutality of contemporary society, with many of his works drawing from the context of his native South Africa.

Internationally recognized as a leading contemporary artist, Kentridge was recently in Japan for the opening of his first comprehensive exhibition here, organized by the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto. The exhibition departs from other interpretations of Kentridge's work by giving equal weight to the political implications of the artist's subject matter and his formal investigation into what curator Shinji Kohmoto describes as "the mechanics of the modern way of seeing."

Taking a break from preparations for his Sept. 4 lecture-performance "I Am Not Me, The Horse is Not Mine," presented at Kyoto Kaikan Concert Hall in conjunction with the exhibition, Kentridge discussed his ideas and influences with the Japan Times.

This is your largest survey exhibition to date. What was it like working with the curatorial team?

The lead curator Shinji Kohmoto and I met about 10 years ago and have been discussing an exhibition ever since. Shinji is one of the great curators. For example, the "9 Drawings for Projection" animations are being shown for the first time together on five screens in one room. That partly has to do with the confidence I have in Japanese technology. I felt that if anybody were going to find a way to separate the soundtracks and make it work on headsets, it would happen here. So I was open to Shinji's proposal of putting the animations in one room rather than in separate rooms or on one reel, which is how I would have done it. He has also emphasized a wide range of material. This is the only survey of my work to include the stereoscopic drawings and prints.

Do you feel that the curators brought a different perspective to understanding your work compared to those you have worked with elsewhere?>

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Observing the pieces of a fragmented self
That remains to be seen. A year ago I'd never been to Japan but I'd seen Japanese films and read novels, and from those constructed a possible Japan in my head. Even if it's a misunderstanding, it's a coherent misunderstanding. So reversing the situation, my hope is that even if people don't know the specifics of South African history and politics, they will be able to construct a possible vision of the world represented in my work. It may differ from my own or that of someone from South Africa but it doesn't stop it from being interesting for the viewer. I'm very much in favor of productive misunderstandings and mistranslations.

Is there anything in your work that you are directly communicating?

I suppose I'm communicating the agency of looking, as in the stereoscopic films and drawings, or the fact that the animations themselves are very fragmentary and incoherent. Whatever coherence they obtain is generated by the viewer. Insofar as there's a polemic, it's about the active part we play in looking.

How did the stereoscopic prints and drawings come about?

Those came about partly out of the pleasure that one derives from stereoscopes and a whole range of pre-cinematic devices that engage the activity of looking. So I enjoy making them, but then you begin to question the source of the pleasure.

It's the pleasure of self-deception. Even though you know you are looking at two flat drawings, you can't stop your brain from seeing an illusion of depth.

Do you find the context of South Africa dictates the way people look at your art?

The films are the same whoever is looking at them, so if there are vastly different interpretations, then those are about the people making the interpretations rather than the films.

I'm sure the temptation is to find a context for understanding the material. A lot of the films come from events that were happening around Johannesburg at the time they were made, from the last year of Apartheid in 1989 to the current era of AIDS in South Africa.

For me the "9 Drawings for Projection" are clearly drawing from South Africa; the Russian films have an echo in South Africa but they're about utopia and politics and are not a metaphor for South Africa.

The Russian films include the installation "I Am Not Me, The Horse is Not Mine" (2008), which references Constructivist aesthetics. Where does that interest come from?

The 1920s in Russia saw astonishing developments in film, graphics and image making. I'm interested in that period in terms of thinking about art and politics and the visual languages that existed before Modernism hived off into abstraction and Matisse.

I'm also interested in the extent to which belief in the system inspired the leaps in imagination the Constructivists made. Were they only interested in formal information, or in fact was it their belief in the social revolution that said then, "everything can change"? It's still an unanswered question for me.

The early poster triptych "Art in a State of Siege" (1988) also has a strong agitprop feel to it.

Part of that set of prints was done as an agit poster for the centenary of Johannesburg. It was going to be pasted on the streets at night and then the people I was doing it with got cold feet. They're not in the exhibition but I also did a lot of posters for trade unions and political organizations in the 1980s, and the triptych evolved out of that.

What is it like to be an artist in the 21st century investigating Constructivism and agitprop?

Well, the easy utopianism of that era seems impossible now. There are too many cases where all the certainty and ideals came adrift. But one still needs utopia as a political category. My works become essays in the sense that they're reflections on the grand hope of utopianism in the 1920s.

I'm also interested in the early roots of Modernism, the Dada before Dada, and that's what my lecture-performance version of "I Am Not Me, The Horse is Not Mine" is about: the absurd 250 years ago. The fragmentation of the absurd as a way of understanding the world actually has a long history of which Modernism is only one manifestation.

We're now living in a world of extraordinary different kinds of communication and image making, but I'm not close enough to simply accept it. So the kind of celebration that Jeff Koons might do of contemporary culture just seems temperamentally impossible to me.

Did you discover anything new about your work in the process of organizing the show?

I'll have to think. What I've got to do is replay the exhibition to myself in my head over time, when I'm not here. It's too early to know what things worked and what didn't.