From Ordinary to Extraordinary – Takahiro Iwasaki’s Push on Perspective.

Koganebana
mo sakeru ya hon no hana no haru
Shinchu- to miru yamabuki no iro

The golden flowers
have also bloomed!
The true flowers of spring.
They look like brass,
The color of the gold coins.

Sequence from: Crimson Plum Thousand Verses (Ko-bai senku, 1653)

***

At the exit of Portland Japanese Garden stands a sign that I am all too happy to comply with, over and over again.

This time there was a twofold incentive to return. For one, the rains had finally set in, and my hopes for a garden washed clean from the drought’s dust were met. Light reflected from water drops, pond surfaces and glossy leaf and needle trees.

Green, embedded in fall colors of higher wavelengths, gleamed as saturated as one could wish for.

The second reason for my return visit was the opening of the exhibition Takahiro Iwasaki: Nature of Perception, featuring work of this season’s artist-in-residence at the garden, a stay made possible by the Japan Institute’s Global Center for Culture and Arts.

Takahiro Iwasaki was born and lives in Hiroshima. He received his Ph.D. from Hiroshima City University in 2003 and a Master of Fine Arts from the Edinburgh College of Art in 2005. Many of his installations can be subsumed into two large bodies of work, Reflection Model and Out of Disorder. The work has increasingly found international audiences and collectors, including well received exhibitions at NGV (National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia) in 2015, and as representative of Japan in the Japan Pavilion at the Venice Biennial 2017, Venice, Italy (2017).

The newest Reflection Model is presented at our own Pavilion in the garden, and an installation that fits the second category is on view at the Calvin and Mayho Tanabe Gallery, with a title that invites us to see things anew. Let me describe them in turn.

Iwasaki’s early reflection models were scaled-down versions of some of the most famous architecture in all of Japan, seven Shinto shrines. The breathtakingly detailed and accurate representations of these architectural marvels are hand-made of wood, some as large as 8 x 8 meters (26.2 x 26.2 feet). They are suspended from the ceiling, and have a 3-D mirror inversion that simulates reflection in water, as many of the actual shrines are located near bodies of water that reflects or even immerses them with the tide. For many of the larger structures, individual parts nestle into each other with slot and tenon joints that avoid complete rigidity, allowing strength through flexibility, as so many of the building techniques in a nation prone to earthquakes. The wood is untreated cypress, that will eventually fade to silver. (I photographed the model first at 8:00 am, when we had not quite figured out where the lights were in the Pavilion. The images have a grey tone that probably comes closer to faded cypress than those taken when my friendly host found the switch.)

Takahiro Iwasaki Reflection Model (Rashomon) (2023)

The model on view is a re-creation of the Rashomon Gate at the entrance of the city of Kyoto which played a central role in Akira Kurasawa’s 1950 film of the same name. Kurasawa himself had the gate fashioned as a set piece from historical drawings and literary descriptions. Iwasaki, in turn, looked at images from the movie and recreated the design to scale, with every piece cut by hand, with the sole exception of the the sign that spells the name of the gate. The sign Rashomon (羅生門) was manufactured by a laser cutter and is also depicted as a mirror reflection of each kanji character.

My first reaction was incredulity that someone could make a detailed model of this size by hand: it must take the patience of a saint, the visual acuity of an eagle and the steady hands of a brain surgeon.Never mind the vision of drawing the plans. Nothing but respect for the craftsmanship.

My second thought was focused on the word reflection. In English it has, of course, at least two meanings: the mirroring of a visual object in a reflective surface, and the contemplation of an idea, or some careful consideration or meditation. The suggested mirroring via the inverse doubling of this sculpture puts us in a perceptual quandary: reflection in real life is visually associated with the slightest distortion, the shimmer of a mirrored surface, the undulations of water moved by a breeze. Here static solidity rules, and that sense of an object with its inverse twin frozen in time and space is completely at odds with the seeming lack of gravity. That structure is floating in the air, yet unmoving, the doubling so unnatural that you start distrusting your eyes. The nature of perception: it can be fooled.

Reflection on all that this sculpture invokes beyond perception provides further challenges. The flyer and other signage that is provided to the visitor stresses the art’s connection to the concept of mono no aware (もののあはれ) defined as the understanding of the ephemeral nature of things. For Iwasaki’s earlier shrine sculptures the historical impact of war and nuclear destruction was obvious. For the current installation, the dilapidated nature of of the gate points in that direction, as well as the background information that it was reconstructed from images in the film, with the set piece itself no longer existing. One step further into the past, we know that the actual historical gate into Kyoto has long been destroyed.

Rashomon Detail

The reverence for and connectedness to history clearly informs the choice of subject for both, Kurasawa and later Iwasaki, almost defiantly reconstituting a dissolute architectural object back into existence. Yet both gates remind us in their dilapidated states of the ravages of weather, time and human impact. (In the film you see early on how someone breaks apart the wood of the slatted walls to build a fire.)

Screenshots of the Rashomon Gate from the 1950 film by Akira Kurasawa, in the deluge of rain that sets the mood for the violent story, fortified by music that reminds of Ravel’s Bolero. The film can be watched here.

Mono no aware, I learned, can also be translated differently: it can be a feeling of emptiness, or, literally, the pathos of things, or, in literature and film, it is often associated with “a lack of resolution.” In other words, a story without a clear-cut ending.

That brings us to Rashomon, the film, which has become a cultural icon signifying the lack of resolution to a mystery, because one single truth cannot be discerned among many truths that are voiced. Let me pause here for a moment and introduce the warning given by Portland Japanese Garden in multiple instances.

Portland Japanese Garden cautions potential viewers of Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon to be cognizant of the gender inequities and dismissive portrayal of the nameless samurai’s wife. Part of Rashomon’s lasting influence is in how it perpetuates stereotypes about women, and discredits female voices, experiences, and testimonies while upholding the “conventional wisdom” of conservative patriarchal society. Alongside its cultural impact and cinematographic beauty, the film has been described as “unsettling” and “disturbing.” Takahiro Iwasaki, our featured artist, used the image of rashomon purely as a lasting cultural metaphor and did not intend his work to be a validation of the specific content of Kurosawa’s film.

I appreciate the sensitivity to issues that might concern or upset viewers. But if you give a veiled trigger warning it should not be cloaked in generalities. The film’s central action is the killing of a man who witnessed the rape of his wife. In subsequent court proceedings eye witnesses to the crime(s) are heard and tell completely different versions of how things unfolded. These versions are cinematically provided by flashbacks that play the scenario out in different ways, depending on the perspective of those involved: the accused perpetrator who accosted the woman and perhaps murdered the husband, the wife who might or might not have fought valiantly enough against the rapist and who might have killed her husband after he scorned and rejected her for being defiled, and the dead man himself, through a medium, who might have committed suicide to spare his wife shame or because he could not bear his own, due to the stipulated accusation that she gave in to seduction. Another layer of potential misinformation is added by the fact that the court proceedings are related to a bystander by two people who had tangential or not so tangential involvement with the main narrative.

It is important to know these facts because they concern the significance of Iwasaki’s choice of subject to be created, the gate. For this viewer, at least, he links questions that were enacted in eleventh century Japan and asked by a filmmaker in the 20th century to a historical point in time, now the 21st century, where the Me Too debate has reached a feverish pitch and created a significant backlash. Who is to be trusted as an eye witness where accusations and denials are offered not just dependent on perceptions, but on motivated shaping of truths to achieve or escape justice? The lineage of artists who wonder if there can ever be a discernment of truth, or if we need to stress the fact that illusion can be created (just as he creates the perceptual illusion of a mirror effect) now includes Iwasaki.

The point is not that there are no truths – there are. However, they can be obscured by external manipulations of reality, including societies’ misogynistic value systems that often disbelieve, ridicule or even blame female victims, or overrule female witnesses or try to dial back the clock, depriving women of rights that they and their allies fiercely fought for. (As an aside: I read Kurasawa’s narrative as a potential acknowledgment of frequently abused women’s fury that can no longer be contained, since he allows her to voice several truths. The preponderance of evidence speaks to the likely resolution that the wife killed her husband with a dagger when he calls her a whore for having been defiled against her will.)

All of this is additionally connected to a second Japanese concept, mitate (見立て), to see things with fresh eyes, but which can also mean a radical re-contextualization of things that link the past to the present. This approach is exemplified in the other two small installations in the Pavilion. Iwasaki made miniature cranes out of threads pulled from discarded materials, fortified with glue, and stuck them into books related to Kurasawa’s art. It is as if they are lifting the filmmaker and his work out of the (not-so-distant) past into the present, re-igniting or continuing a debate about the dangers of relativism, and the importance of skepticism. These miniatures are displayed in acrylic containers, like artful keepsakes that recall traditional Japanese netsuke, and lit in a fashion that multiplies their reflections. This doubling and quadrupling echoes, of course, the Rashomon theme of various perspectives.

Mitate as a concept of double vision, the past and the present, plays a major role in Japanese textural transpositions as well, often transposing old poetry celebrating high culture into something modern that is more plebeian, occasionally even amounting to parody. Sometimes these additions to verses of old happen hundreds of years later, with the referent not even contained in the new poetry, with the assumption it is known to people. (Ref.)

This re-categorization is achieved by means of a visual symbol that turns the old meaning on its head. The verses I cited at the introduction are the perfect example for visual transposition.

The golden flowers
have also bloomed!
The true flowers of spring.
They look like brass,
The color of the gold coins.

I liked the idea of a beautiful flower, symbol of high culture, connecting us to all things Japanese garden, being subsequently turned into an image of quotidian mercantilism. Written, no less, 20 years before the Dutch tulip mania collapsed in 1673, leaving scores ruined from speculation with beautiful flowers….

The reason I bring this up is the fact that you only get the puns or re-contextualizations, if you are familiar with the poets or visual artists of old. You have to be able to move in a cultural framework that requires familiarity with the cues, the connections, be part of a shared body of knowledge. (In Western art I can think of the interpretation of all the cues dropped throughout Renaissance paintings, for example, that allowed the educated viewer to derive meaning.) Knowledge of Rashomon the film, then, matters a great deal for the full appreciation of the art displayed in the Pavilion.

***

The installation displayed in acrylic casing in the Tanabe Gallery simply invites us to see things anew. No higher order cultural knowledge required. It shows a miniature world of Portland’s bridges and other landmarks fashioned out of glue-stiffened threads pulled from the donated or found cloth that also provides the geological strata underneath. The use of discarded objects and household items to fashion industrial or other landscapes is nothing new in Iwasaki’s body of work; here it is geared towards familiarity with our city and likely generates the positive affect that recognition provides. The choice of cloth reveals no discernible pattern, and the display of Trader Joe’s logo, a chain of stores now owned by a German company, remains a mystery.

Takahiro Iwasaki Out of Disorder (Thread through Time) (2023)

The current panorama above, and one from 2015 below, from the Asia Society’s annual “In Focus” series, which was a series of collaborations between contemporary artists and pieces from the Rockefeller Foundation’s collection.

Looking at the miniature bridges certainly elicited pride of place as well as some idiosyncratic associations in my case.

Max Beckman Eisgang 1923 (Ice floes)

The themes of ordinary objects viewed from a different perspective or scale, recycling and reusing discarded materials all matter, and can be used for educating us about perception. In fact, Portland Japanese Garden published a superb curriculum for Grades 6-8 to do just this, linking insights from the artist’s approach back to themes crucial to the garden. It allows a conversation about aspects of Zen philosophy and the possibility of recreating something big with something small, designing landscapes with miniatures, like bonsai trees, or gravel configurations resembling rivers. The artist’s early focus on Manga drawings in the context of new world visions likely informs what we are seeing here as well. This reminds me of a recent Art in the Garden exhibition of The History of Manga and the remarkable collection of materials related to senjafuda, held by the Special Collections and University Archives of the UO Libraries and the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art. There is digital access to many of these miniature works of arts.

Yet Iwasaki’s Out of Disorder (Thread through Time) 2023 is lacking the truly new conceptualization that evolved in the artist’s Reflection Model work, when turning from shrines to an architectural site that has taken on extreme contemporary cultural significance, namely the Rashomon effect: the relativity of truth and unreliability of memory, with often contradictory reports suggesting biased encoding or motivated forgetting or simply lies in divergent witness accounts.

There is much innovative work going on in the miniature domain, from work linking artists past and present by Joe Fig, for example, who recreates artists’ studios in miniature detail,

Joe Fig Henri Mattisse’s Studio (2007)

to Simon Laveuve‘s apocalyptic visions of dwelling in inhospitable places

Simon Laveuve La Guérite (2023)

to Thomas Doyle‘s Distillation Series about man-made and natural disasters.

Thomas Doyle Drift (2018)

It would be great to see Iwasaki’s creativity in ways we have not yet encountered. His invitation to see things with fresh eyes, however, remains inspirational. Walking through the rain-splattered garden on my way back from the exhibition, the gaze was drawn to familiar constellations now altered by water. The bench at the Sand and Stone Garden looked almost like a rectangular puddle, the stairways ever closer to resembling a tumbling brook.

The Flat Garden pebbles glistened, raked into rice paddy patterns, and the arranged chairs for the moon viewing called for rain paints.

Contrasting trunk and foliage of the maples reminded of the transition from light to darker times,

and the raindrops put new patterns on bamboo and slate alike.

Fall has arrived. Just like the art on display, it brings new beauty to the garden, allowing for fresh perspectives.

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Possible Worlds

· Jun Kaneko at Portland Japanese Garden ·

Art, Garden Design
Oct 10, 2022
1 Comments

“The Japanese garden is not an enigma. Instead, it is more like an intricate and beautiful specimen of origami whose secrets cannot be readily plumbed by the casual observer. Just as we can with patience and care learn the folds and tucks that comprise the delicate paper crane, so can we come to understand and appreciate the components of the Japanese garden and understand the ideology and philosophy that underlie its creation. The Japanese garden is not intended to be a riddle but rather a reserved – almost sacred space in which the rootless wanderer may pause from the travails of daily life long enough to place them within perspective…. They are spiritual amplifiers, sounding boxes for the human soul.” – Andrew R. Deane, Japanese Gardens: Notes on Perspectives, Perceptions & Synthesis.

GREAT GARDENS entice you to return. If you are lucky enough to live close to one, repeat visits across seasons provide a panorama of change, sometimes subtle, sometimes dramatic, depending on the weather, the amount of light present, and decisively the time of year.

And so it was for me, after just having written about Portland Japanese Garden some weeks ago, that I visited again, this time, however, with a bit of trepidation. The change I anticipated was not so much the maples, finding their way to full color only in late October, if that with the drought. Rather I wondered about the addition of art into the landscape, part of the current exhibition Garden of Resonance: The Art of Jun Kaneko. Multiple large sculptures are placed across the garden.

All images were taken by me at Portland Japanese Garden, unless otherwise noted. All of Kaneko’s sculptures are untitled. The taller Dango sculpture weighs 63 lbs, the shorter one 35 lbs. They are on heavy stone bases that have been neatly covered in soil and moss. The base for the shorter sculpture weighs 604 lbs, the base for the taller is 500 lbs. The sculptures are glazed by hand using traditional Japanese-made brushes.

The Pavilion contains recent work, including glass sculpture, drawings, paintings, hand built and glazed raku ceramics.

Drawings and paintings all untitled.

I have been, publicly and passionately, lamenting the fashionable practice of Botanical Gardens to drop art among the plants. I understand the temptation to succumb to the “wow” factor, as Sabina Carr, Atlanta Botanical Garden’s vice president for marketing, succinctly put it: “Wow, you have to see this.” (Visitors there can currently experience Origami in the Garden, metal sculptures resembling those folded papers, on steroids, many over 20 ft tall in technicolor hues. No comment.)

I also understand that attracting more and different visitors, whether by presenting Chihuly’s eye candy or melancholic simians by local talent, makes a difference to marketing, and at times ensures economic survival. But I am worried that we’re losing the ability to pay the attention necessary for learning of, and finding out about, a single subject.

This is inevitable, given how evolution geared our visual system to segregate figure from ground. Perceptual attention magnets that are linked to entertainment and visual pleasure are distracting from the task at hand – education about plants. Botanical gardens were historically, after all, meant to help us understand taxonomies, or possibly develop interest in biology. They are where pressing issues of conservation are made tangible, where you begin to understand the links of flora, climate and geography. Much of it pushed aside by the unavoidable visual pull of art among the shrubbery. I hastened to add, at the time,

“I have nothing whatsoever against Giacomettis on your pristine lawn that make the neighbors drool, or marble busts under your rows of Linden trees, or garden gnomes lining the lily pond. Well, I might reconsider the approach to gnomes. Art in gardens serves a purpose to guide the gaze toward the distance, shaping the way you view the horizon, or it delights you in the close-up, concentrating space. But your own garden, estate gardens, publicly accessible gardens, are not about what at the core defines botanic gardens: the scientific study of and education about plants.”

***

WHERE DOES A TRADITIONAL JAPANESE GARDEN fit into these considerations? On the one hand, one might argue that it is a space of quiet contemplation and immersion into nature. As Andrew Deane so aptly put it: “a sounding box for the human soul.” Adding thrills, no matter how beautiful the art, could potentially counteract this. It is also the case that traditionally Japanese gardens avoid combining out-of-scale elements. The art of reduction is an important principle within the Japanese tradition – miniaturization, after all, a trope – and the specific size of the objects is aesthetically important. Large objects, then, might interrupt the flow.

On the other hand – and I come decisively down on this side – these gardens are designed, not just traditionally incorporating sculpture, albeit restrained in size, in form of lanterns or bridges or pagodas, but in some ways being sculptured themselves, a fictional environment, as someone put it, resembling or symbolizing aspects of nature. Historically they have always been open to innovation. Varying philosophic and religious principles were applied to create a certain aesthetic, and changing tastes in general found their way into design. Already during the Muromachi period (1338–1573,) the character of gardens shifted with exploration added to or superseding contemplation. Different periods favored different degrees of elaboration—shin, gyo, and so – (“elaborate,” “intermediate,” and “informal”) are acknowledged principles in garden design, allowing evolution while maintaining a base of traditional elements. We might just think of the (temporary) addition of sculpture as a shin blossoming of this season that adds elaboration – and a reminder that perspectives change, our own as much as those found in the context of the garden landscape or the flora.

Before I turn to the absorbing art on display, two questions remain. How do the gardeners feel about these changes, given that their long involvement with the garden probably invokes a sense of ownership and responsibility to protect? They are the heart of a garden, their labor and care pumping the necessary ingredients through the veins of it, keeping it alive. Of course I could not ask them “Hey, how do you feel about 200+ pounds of clay being plopped on your delicate mosses,” and even if I did, what could they possibly say?

(The sculptures can range from 30 to 3,000lbs. The largest ones can take up to three years to complete and involves hand built construction by attaching thick, large slabs of clay to build up the shape, strategic drying to help make the sculpture sturdy enough to continue building higher and higher without the lower levels cracking and breaking, bisque firing in a kiln to solidify the form, then glazing and firing for a final time to bring out the colors of the glaze.)

A penny for their thoughts. And another one for the brains of the garden, to stick with the analogy, the leadership team that was responsible for the selection of the works. What criteria were used to exclude visual dominance or competition? The garden’s announcement contained the reassurance that

“While it is not the first time that Portland Japanese Garden has displayed large-scale art in its garden spaces, art “in situ” is still a rarity. Pieces on display were carefully selected by the team to accentuate the landscape, without overwhelming or competing with it.”

The choices, in the end, were quite convincing. Nothing was overwhelming, sizes manageable, and the one placement of extraordinarily large objects fit well into the center of the Cultural Village Courtyard, not distracting from the garden per se. There was a consistent, coherent and often peaceful color scheme of black, white and blues throughout, with the occasional outlier hue that related to its surround. A pleasure to take in.

***

“The challenge of making successful work is to create art that strongly engages the viewer’s imagination in any environmental circumstance in which it is place and experienced. Nothing exists by itself. Everything exists with the balance or imbalance of its relationship to others. This may be one of my central concerns and interests when creating any work. – Jun Kaneko

JUN KANEKO IS NO STRANGER to Portland. He has exhibited here at various venues across decades, and shown extreme generosity in his creation and partial donation of an artistic wall to the Beaverton Library. He is in continual collaboration with the folks at Bullseye Glass, and linked to our current composer in residence at the Oregon Symphony Orchestra, Andy Akiho. The world premiere of Akiho’s commissioned new work honoring Jun Kaneto will be presented in Omaha by the Omaha Symphony in March 2023.

Kaneko was born in Nagoya, Japan in 1942. Trained as a painter, he came to the United States in the early 1960s, and became interested in and involved with the California Clay Movement. Although he worked with different media throughout the years, his super-sized ceramics have been the focus of much public attention, and gained him the 2021 Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award. Details about his career, honors, his studio(s) across the world and his and his wife’s Ree KANEKO Foundation in Omaha, Nebraska where he has lived since 1986, can be explored on their websites, which are exquisitely organized. There is also an informative introductory essay to the artist’s work and philosophical outlook from 2021 at Sculpture Magazine. A recent book offers gorgeous photographs and analysis of the evolution of the work.

All sources have interesting bits on the synthesis between ceramic work and formal and post-painterly abstraction, as well as Kaneko’s exploration of different modes of space – the way it is arranged between markings on a sculpture, the way it relates, and the dimensions it assumes. They also point to the evolution of artistic practice towards community interaction and public arts projects which have been a hallmark of the latter stages of Kaneko’s career.

I want to concentrate on Kaneko’s imperative (as quoted above) to engage the viewer’s imagination, and the fundamental relationships – that of maker to artwork, art work to or within environment, and eventually that of perceiver to artwork, the way I experienced it. And experience is the key concept here. I might understand a few things about what brought these sculptures about, more familiar with the vocabulary of modernist painting that is now applied to three-dimensional, often curved space, than the techniques of working with clay (I was stunned to learn that some of his larger works need several years to dry before even the first layer of glaze.) I might understand localism, but also that a traveler between distinct cultures has the choice to reinvent himself, adopt the super-sizing of a country keen on BIG, yet retain some sort of etherial aesthetic that I associate with Asian porcelains.

It is my emotional reaction to the combination of these two, however, those large, solid, earthy, comforting forms seemingly dressed with swathes of fluid, gauzy glazes, energized by dancing dots or swirling spirals or drooping fringes that echo falling rain, that gets me interested in this art. It is the experience that resonates.

Soft rain making the surface more reflective.

Jerome Bruner, one of the founders of the field of cognitive psychology and an eternity ago my dissertation advisor, used to lecture me that desire shapes perception, when at the time I only cared for research on the links between emotion and remembrance. He argued that our focus – my focus – on rational aspects of mental life, our ability to analyze and problem solve was too narrow. It is imagination, he suggested, that allows us to make experience meaningful. That narrative mode, as he laid it out in Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (1986), is of course context dependent. It is affected by our physical and emotional states, by stereotypes and closely held beliefs, and ultimately by our willingness to let go of our ties to logic and let our imagination roam without constraints.

Roam it did. Kaneko’s Dangos, Japanese dumpling-like shaped, might stand for childhood sweets for the artist. In me the vertical cones evoked, despite the absence of defining human features, associations to grandmotherly dimensions, some bulging forms of comforting embraces. Maybe it was the vague resemblance to the form of Babushkas of yore, my childhood nesting dolls. Maybe it was the isolation of the pandemic, the thirst for human contact that led to anthropomorphizing. A thirst not simply slacked by saturated colors, although the optimistic Prussian Blue provided lovely contrast to the misty morning air.

Note how the pattern echoes the surrounding leafy background. Resonating with the garden.

Little drops, the first fall precipitation, adorning some like pearls.

There seemed to be a guardian in front of the Pavilion, standing watch on land that once belonged to others. My imagination assigned the markings on this graceful piece the role of dreamcatcher – impressed by the strength of three-dimensionality captured in the painted shape.

A wound-like marking at the sculpture’s base completed the association to Pacific Northwest tribal history. Art stimulating narrative, potentially accounting for relationships with others and our debt.

***

BY INCLINATION AND BY TRAINING, I live in my head. My go-to mode is analytical, and I have always thought that being strongly drawn to gardens all across the world is rooted in the fact that those are places where the mind can wander. You don’t have to understand a garden, you are free to just experience it. Art is a trickier domain. It often begs for understanding, particularly when you’re trying to help others makes sense of it and judge its potential merits. Art that truly reaches me, however, is always one that manages to hush my analytic mode, and let imagination in, telling stories filled with affect. Building possible worlds, full of subjective resonance.

One of the strongest experiences of that kind happened a few years back during a fall visit to Venice for the 2015 Biennale, crowds long gone. I traveled alone and found myself late afternoon in the inner courtyard of an ancient Venetian church, Madonna dell’Orto, one of Tintoretto’s favorites. Large heads carved out of rock by British sculptor Emily Young were situated in the cloister, the covered walkways surrounding the enclosure, looking out into the space and at each other. The exhibition was titled Call and Response, and it felt indeed as if those faces called to me. A benevolent yet insistent, often female presence in the male dominated, hierarchical environment of the catholic church. I later learned that the artist intended her work to instill communication between mankind and nature, with an eye on climate change destruction in the wings. But at that moment, the distance between me and sculpture filled with emotional connection originating in the seeming call by inanimate faces carved in stone.

Photocredit Friderike Heuer

It is obvious why that memory resurfaced. When you enter Portland Japanese Garden you encounter two humongous heads, facing each other in the Village Courtyard. One has expressed facial features, the other encourages face pareidolia, our tendency to see faces in nebulous forms, an inclination that is often used to advantage by visionary artists. There is something distinctly theatrical in the way they are positioned, a call and response imaginable between them, a felt disruption when people’s movement fill the gap between.

Theatric expression, in the form of opera set and costume design, has been a part of Kaneko’s more recent artistic practice. So many constraints: constant shift in lighting, constant change in spatial relations, the need to have the music not overwhelmed by visual riches – by all reports, the artistry involved for productions of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, Beethoven’s Fidelio, and Mozart’s The Magic Flute at world-renowned opera houses produced resounding successes. (The March 2023 concert of the Omaha Symphony will feature music from all three Kaneko-designed operas, accompanied by visual projections of his work. Images of the designs can be found here.)

Static sculpture escapes those pressures. Its relation to the visual environment is constant.

***

THE INSTAGRAM CROWD will descend on this display and any of the others that lend themselves to physical approach. But that will not be the only way these sculptures resonate. Resonance, after all, the term in the exhibition’s title, has so many different meanings. It refers to amplification through additional vibration – note, we’re back to the sounding box! It can also mean a quality of richness or variety, or the quality of evoking a response. A response that included a decided urge to touch the art, a desire to be physically connected, and not just for the junior set.

If the response to Kaneko’s work is to take pictures, our current means of linking to community and sharing the experience in times of isolation, that would be, by my prediction, a pleasing result to the master. It would be the other end of the arc in a career which saw the artist consigning creativity to the audience in early days. In 1971 people were invited (with seemingly empty invitations printed white on white) to come and see blank walls at the Form Gallery in Osaka, Japan. What do you experience in a space where there is nothing? Visitors were provided with a camera and allowed to take pictures of anything of interest to them and then the films were developed. The resulting photographs would fill the walls for the duration of the show.

We are privileged in 2022 to have our photography – and our narratives – stimulated by more than blank walls. Kaneko’s art at Portland Japanese Garden encourages immersion into different worlds of our own making.

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Garden of Resonance: The Art of Jun Kaneko

October 1, 2022 / February 20th, 2023

Portland Japanese Garden

611 SW Kingston Avenue
Portland, OR 97205

Wednesday – Monday: 10:00am – 4:00pm (closed Tuesdays)

Glazed raku ceramic

Ring-tailed pigeon in my garden

***

Portland Japanese Garden: New Additions to an Old Treasure.

“Memories of Hiroshima are what drives me to take action to restore peace.
In order to achieve peace, the international community must make it clear that aggression as such brings consequences.”

– Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida in a speech at the Guildhall in London, U.K., on May 5, 2022.

SCIENCE. ART. GARDEN(S). A perfect trifecta, all told. Superseded by thoughts of peace. Recent visits to Portland Japanese Garden, one of our city’s treasures, stretched both mind and senses along those lines.

I had not been to the garden in a while. First it was closed for a serious $33.5 million remodel, with new buildings added, and the approach path restructured. Then the pandemic ensued. I was excited, therefore, when my visiting kids suggested the outing – delighted by novelty and grateful for the familiar.

You now pay at the bottom of the hill, then climb up a beautifully landscaped path, eventually entering through the old gate which still greets you with familiar detail.

Bamboo grids support aquatic planting and platforms amplify the sound of dripping water or rainfall while installed as visual screens on the ground, covering mechanical features and drains.

Bell at the old entrance gate

Portland Japanese Garden was an idea conceived in the late 1950s in the context of the US’s attempt to improve relations with Japan after the horrors of WW II. It was founded in 1963, declared the Year of Peace. The project was based on the assumption that the experience of a peaceful environment could be transferred to healing on a larger scale, leaving the hostilities between the nations behind us, promoting reconciliation. I had to look it up, of course, since I don’t speak Japanese, but there are multiple words in Japanese linked to these aspects. 和平 (wahei) means peace, 和解 (wakai) means reconciliation or rapprochement, and 和む (nagono) means to be softened or calming down. All three concepts can be found in the garden: peace as a mission, rapprochement in acts of cultural exchange (more below) and calming, if you immerse yourself in the nature on offer.

Sign at the entrance, maple plantings and water feature.

It is only fitting that the Japan Institute, an extension of Portland Japanese Garden founded last year and devoted to connecting people internationally and exchanging ideas about peace through cultural diplomacy, has created a Peace Program Series.

The first symposium,“Peacemaking at the Intersection of Culture, Art, and Nature,” will be staged in Tokyo, Japan on the United Nation’s International Day of Peace, September 21, 2022. Before that, replicas of the garden’s own peace lantern will be given as Peace Lantern as symbolic gifts to Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Tokyo.

The “Peace Lantern” (neko ashi yukimi), on the East bank of the Upper Strolling Pond.

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IT TOOK ALMOST seven years from site dedication to opening in 1967, revealing a riveting acreage of 5-in-1 gardens, each reflecting different historical development styles in Japanese horticulture, designed by Paul Takuma Tono (1891 – 1987.) Educated both in Japan and the US, Tono was the head of the landscape architecture department at Tokyo Agricultural University, led a design firm that produced renowned public and private landscapes, and designed a Japanese garden for the Memphis, TN, Botanic Garden as well as the one here in Portland.

Tono’s vision of the flat garden (hira-niwa). The gravel was imported from Japan, deemed too white in its original marble and color- adjusted with more off-white gravel. That kind of attention to detail, getting it “right,” is a hallmark of this garden.

Across the decades, the space began to be open year round, and several structures were added; most recently three LEED-certified buildings compose a Cultural Village, skillfully nestled in the surrounding nature, realized by Japanese architect Kengo Kuma for whom this was the first American project. (You can find a recent book about his approach to this particular design and his vision in general here.) Three steel-and-glass pavilions linked by a large courtyard provide space for arts, horticulture, education, a library and a giftshop (quadrupled in size to the old one) and a café. Real growth for a cultural institution, grounds for celebration. Not everyone was happy, though.

Some members of the adjacent Arlington Heights Neighborhood Association worried that the commercial additions to the garden were double the approved size from the city’s land use decision, and would result in increased noise and congestion, a loss of open space. They claimed that the garden didn’t honor promises to mitigate lighting to maintain a dark sky in the park and limit spillover to the neighborhood, or use bird-safe construction practices. (Ref.) This was during the construction phase some years back – I could find no further information, so hopefully all is resolved.

Water not absorbed by the green roofs drips into graveled dry-wells. Class- and meeting rooms are airy with glass sliding doors that allow the outside in and sheltered by wooden slats.

The buildings flank a new wall, Zagunis Castle wall, the first of its kind outside of Japan. Built by a 15th-generation (!) master stonemason, Suminori Awata, who usually repairs old ones at home and was delighted in the opportunity to build a new one, it is supposed to invoke medieval Japan.

Zagunis Castle Wall

The garden attracts between 3000 and 4000 visitors on its most crowded days, much dependent on season, but also receives other communal support. Lots of organizations, for examples, have donated trees like this red pine.

Individuals volunteered to build bridges – I was told that a 98 year-old Robert C. Burbank recently visited to look at the Moon Bridge he helped fashion from an old redwood effluent container no longer in use at the factory where he worked many years ago.

The garden, in turn, gives back – there is, I learned after wondering about the high cost of admission, making visits seemingly out of reach for economically disadvantaged folks, a membership category named in honor of this Moon Bridge. For $20, Oregon and Southwest Washington families receiving public income-related assistance can become annual members of the garden. It also participates in the Multnomah Library Discovery Pass program, donating free tickets that library patrons in need can reserve.

The basic structure of the garden is unchanged, with its many inviting and/or hidden vistas,

its Koi ponds,

tea house garden (cha-niwa,)

its maple trees that attract practically every single Portland photographer in the fall,

and its strolling (kaiyū-shiki-teien) or sand and stone gardens (karesansui).

Buddha and the Tiger cubs. Karesansui or dry landscape garden, focusses on the beauty of blank space, often found as parts of Zen monasteries.

Eight full-time gardeners and many volunteers tend to the place, with daily (!) raking of moss one of the many repetitive chores. I appreciated that they interrupted their work for me, answering my questions and letting me take photographs. Thank you, caretaker Masaki! Of course, I always return to photographing the same subjects, my beloved conifers and the occasional maples. He, on the other hand, returns to taking care of the Bonsai.

A 500 year-old Rocky Mountain Juniper at the Bonsai Display at the Bonsai Terrace.

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THE VISUAL BEAUTY of the garden is renowned and the obvious magnet for scores of visitors each year. There is another feature, though, that we should think about as well. A growing movement in contemporary landscape architecture suggests to integrate soundscapes and thinking about sound in gardens, a sensory experience that has scientifically acknowledged positive effects on our health. There has been a recent flurry of research focussing on the impact of sound, with some concentrating on untouched natural environments to prevent more sound pollution, and others looking at designed natural spaces. The upshot of much of the medical literature: too much noise is bad for your health, but exposure to nature and garden visits can lead to reduced heart rate and improve our circulatory systems as well as our mood, and they certainly engage our senses. Perhaps not news to traditional gardeners. Sound has been integral to Japanese landscape design for centuries, after all. For the rest of us, new to the idea and curious, I am summarizing an in-depth exploration of 88 Japanese gardens, found here, and apply examples found in our very own garden.

Water features add wanted natural sound and also provide auditory masking for unwanted sounds.

Sound is a variable that can be looked at from different perspectives. You can embrace wanted sounds, you can avoid unwanted sounds, and sometimes you can invite unwanted sounds (as a contrast effect.) Wanted sounds can be introduced in gardens by the sounds of water, vegetation, the materials you walk on, certain biotopes and resonance and reflection. Unwanted sounds can be reduced by noise screens (walls, buildings or hedges etc.) by topography (don’t build next to the highway…) and absorbing (moss as a ground cover) or deflecting materials (tree stands next to garden walls that stop the city noise carried over by wind) to mention a few. None of these are exhaustive lists.

Absorbant moss carpets

Wooden screens at the tea house, protecting against extraneous noise, but also producing natural noise when the fall winds hit at the right angle.

Wanted sounds can be enhanced if you place the garden close to other natural landscapes that provide nature sounds – as is the case in town where Forest Park is a natural backdrop with its wooded hills, bird- and squirrel sounds wafting over. Water features like loud streams or water falls are both providing wanted natural sounds but are also good for auditory masking of traffic or other unwanted noises.

By all reports, Tono stood with his back to the waterfall during installation and directed the placement of rocks and boulders according to the sound that was achieved by different interrelations.

The subtle noise of water trickling engages our senses, it can vary in rhythm and tone, speed and amplitude.

Vegetation can provide pleasant noise: the rustling of leaves, the creaking of branches, the swooshing when the wind moves bamboo, the noise rain makes on broad-leaved plants.

Gravel paths make sounds (as would have the traditional stone paths when frequented by people who historically wore geta, wooden shoes, that clomped along.) Large pebbles provide sound surfaces for dripping water.

Biotopes, conscious planting of species that attract birds and their song, for example, also bring about sound, as do shallow ponds for frogs. The fish, of course, splash, occasionally and unexpectedly, with those huge carp making quite the noise.

Add to that the joyous noises of kids squealing with delight when the Koi jump, and the politely mumbled but insistent exhortations by staff/volunteers to refrain from bending too closely over the water to get that perfect shot….

Hard surfaces like concrete walls or large sculptures can amplify desirable sounds.

In sum, next time you visit, extend your awareness to the auditory components delivered by Portland Japanese Garden. They might reliably, if subtly, increase your pleasure. Announced with a gong seen at the Pavilion Gallery some times back! Maybe too loud….

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“Intimacy: noun“

1: the state of being intimate : FAMILIARITY

2: something of a personal or private nature – Merriam-Webster Dictionary

SOMETIMES IT PAYS OFF TO BE BRAVE AND CHEERFUL. I cold-called the folks at the garden to see if I could meet their very first artist-in-residence invited by the Japan Institute, who arrived last week. The Institute is in the process of remodeling a new campus that will eventually hold artist studios and housing as well as lecture halls and administrative offices, an extended cultural space. For now, artists are privately accommodated, recruited through leadership connections and networks keen on showcasing international art related and/or relevant to Japan.

The response to my query could not have been friendlier. Sarah Kate Nomura, the Assistant Director of Exhibitions, filled me in on the mission and future plans of the Japan Institute. Will Lerner, the media relations specialist, fount of knowledge about the garden and all-round interesting conversationalist, made the arrangements and gave me a terrific tour, adding new bits of knowledge when here I thought I knew the place pretty well. And finally I met the artist, who was gracious in giving me time during her whirlwind arrival for a month-long stay now, and repeat visits planned for December and March, when her exhibit will open in the Pavilion Gallery.

Rui Sasaki, conceptual glass artist.

Rui Sasaki is an internationally exhibited, conceptual glass artist who strikes an unusual balance of sensitivity and edginess. Born in Japan, she has lived in multiple places on the archipelago as well as long stretches abroad. The thread that connects much of her work relates to her desire to experience herself within place, craving understanding of and familiarity with her environment, a desire shared by many of us who have changed countries and cultures, in some cases frequently.

What distinguishes her from the rest of us migratory folks, is her ability to create intelligent beauty from the intimacy she develops with her surrounds, extending her descriptive powers to everything from the flora of a particular place to its weather, from observations of present detail of a familiar building, to encapsulation of historic specifics of a particular region.

Sasaki received her BA in industrial, interior and craft design at Musashino Art University in Tokyo, before attending Rhode Island School of Design, where she received her MFA in glass in 2010. I was first alerted to her conceptual gift when I saw images of her craft

Detail of “Liquid Sunshine/I am a Pluviophile” (2019), glass, phosphorescent material, broad-spectrum UV lights, motion detector, 3,353 x 4,267 x 3,658 millimeters as installation. Photo by Yasushi Ichikawa, 33rd Rakow Commission, courtesy of The Corning Museum of Glass.

and heard the interview about the work that scored her the prestigious Corning Museum of Glass Rakow Commission in 2018. The work is gorgeous. The weather theme was subsequently expanded upon with a series on Wearing rain, where the artist re-imagines traditional Japanese rainwear fashioned from rice straw in glass and silver wire, one of my favorites.

Wearing Rain Glass, silver wire (2016) Photo Credit Pal Hoff

Capturing images of a particular site, or representing it in some ways is not new to glass work, of course. One of Sasaki’s favorite artists, Roni Horn (new to me and now I can’t get her out of my head,) for example, collected samples of water from numerous Icelandic glaciers and stored them in transparent glass columns. The Library of Water (2007) is an installation of 24 such containers, refracting and reflecting the light onto a floor covered with a field of words in Icelandic and English which relate to the environmental conditions. Some of the water stored is the last evidence of glaciers that have since melted, a document to the mutability of environments, our unstable place within them, and the need for a sensitive approach to preservation. Here is an interview from Horn’s current show in Paris, laying out some of the principles behind her art anchored in identity and change.

Roni Horn The Library of Water (2007)

One of my own admired glass artists, Beth Lipman, has several projects related to place as well. Her series Alone and the Wilderness (2014) places gazing balls and other blown containers into the landscape, video-graphing the ongoing reflections of nature with changes in light, temperature and weather conditions, exemplified in the video of Windfall, a continuously looped time lapse displayed at the Corning Museum of Glass.

Beth Lipman Windfall (2014)

Rui Sasaki will use her residency at Portland Japanese Garden to extend an ongoing search for connection to the environment she moves in. What started in Japan during a stay at the Houen Temple in Kanazawa will be continued with specifics from the current site. The artist collects local plants and fires them together with the glass, providing a repository for the ashes that maintain a semblance to their prior form, holding past and present in one. I could not help wondering about the significance of ashes for an artist whose country has quite literally risen from the ashes of nuclear incineration. The trans-generational trauma for offspring of survivors of Hiroshima is scientifically well documented, as for many later generations of communities who experienced collective loss, the Holocaust, the families of war veterans, be it Vietnam, Afghanistan, Irak or former Yugoslavia. Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s unshakable anti-nuclear weapons position can be directly linked to his nation’s trauma. Perhaps Sasaki’s subtle beauty can be indirectly associated with the notion that we must not forget. Both urged me to contemplate peace.

Rui Sasaki Residue (Houen-Temple, Kanazawa)

She plans to create four walls composed of these glass components in an installation measuring around 8 feet long and more than 9 feet high, with two openings allowing visitors to move among all sides of the display. The combination of Japanese and newly site-acquired plants will link the two cultures. Sasaki also hopes to represent what she’s gleaned in planned conversations with gardeners and staff of the garden, adding historical bits that forge connection to people as well as botanical environment, opening our eyes to different perspectives on the garden. The work will be fired at Bulleseye Studio and displayed in March at the garden’s Pavilion Gallery.

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THE QUESTION OF (NOT) BELONGING can loom large for people who experience culture (and reverse culture!) shock when moving between countries. It is psychologically adaptive to focus on the next best thing – familiarity with and closeness to a place and its people – since rational as well as affective exploration can distract from the pain of uprootedness, probably made worse by the isolation throughout the pandemic.

Some months ago I reviewed an old, but seminal science fiction novel by Sakyo Komatsu, Japan Sinks, which took 9 years to write. The scenario imagines a scientist’s discovery of the likelihood that all of Japan, the entire archipelago, is going to go under due to earthquakes, ocean floor faults, and what not. One of the narrative lines concerns how the government is handling the crisis, from negligence to obstruction to panic. Another focusses on the distribution of millions of people around the world, with nationalist impulses against immigration vying with empathy for a drowning people. My thoughts:

“The philosophical question it raises, though, is one that we will have to think through in climate change migrations to come: what does it do to your identity, as member of a nation, or a tribe or a culture or a language group, when the place that defines you ceases to exist? Literally is no longer there to return to? Is it destructive to lose that connection to place which is a base for underlying sense of self, or is it empowering because you can shed the debt you incurred as a member of the nation (say of an imperialistic or fascistic past) and start from scratch? “

Untitled – Photomontage from my (2014) On Transience series, this one inspired by Japanese porcelain work seen in the Pavilion Gallery in 2013. (Sueharu Fukami: A Distant View)

Sasaki’s work speaks to a version of this question, the subjective disconnection to origin as experienced by the migrant. She demonstrates resilience to loss by forging an intimate connection to whatever can still be embraced, finding succor in the perceived beauty of an environment, preserving it in glass for all of us to see. But ashes represent the very notion of loss as well. Art as a wake-up call as much as consolation.

Portland will be enriched by her presence.