Artist
Statement
JAPANIMISM takes its inspiration from Japanese Animism, the worship of Nature Spirits and Gods as practiced in the ancient culture of the Japanese archipelago. I, like all of my ancestors before me in Japan, am enthralled by Nature. So it was a natural leap to express this enthusiasm through my photographs. I have sought to capture not only the objective beauty of Nature but the feelings evoked by the delicate, intricate relationship between humans and Nature.
Ancient Japanese injected their reverence for Nature into the way trees, rocks, and ponds were arranged in garden designs. Through the centuries, successive generations of gardeners conveyed subtle philosophical and spiritual messages through the medium of landscaping to garden viewers. Japanese garden design invariably puts great store in hidden meanings, requiring viewers to look closely to grasp the symbolic implications, not unlike a Zen Buddhist koan, a paradoxical riddle waiting to be solved by sudden insight. In the Occidental garden with its geometrical form and symmetry one is steeped in orderly, finite reality. But in a Japanese garden it is the asymmetrical, organic gardenscape composed of a myriad of hidden meditations on the meaning of existence which subtly pulls us into a limitless world of self-discovery.
In addition to valuing the aesthetics of the garden, I also value the high level of respect for Nature, feelings of peace and contentment, and ultimately, the love of life and all living things transmitted by garden creators to us all. My ultimate aim is to create an image that paves the way for viewers to relate to those very same feeling states within themselves.
This series is created by using an infrared camera, thereby achieving a starkly different result than capturing an image in visible light. Green grass and trees will appear white like snow, but the sky appears black. This dramatic polarity is the Yin and Yang, principle of opposites, inherent in Taoism, or what C. G. Jung, the noted father of Depth Psychology, termed, “a tension of the opposites.” From this tension, a new state of existence is born.
西洋の庭園がsymmetry な規則的な配置であるのに対し日本庭園が不規則な構図であるのは、何を意味しているのでしょうか？
それは古来日本人の自然に対する畏敬の念が木、岩、池の配置に反映されており、作り手が空間や風景を通じ、長い時を経て現代の我々にその思いを伝えようとしているのです。
だからこそ日本庭園の見た目の美しさだけでなく、作り手の自然に対する思いや敬意を感じられるよう、安らぎをも与えてくれる空間を写真で表現しています。
その特徴を引き出すため、赤外線カメラで撮影することにより、緑色の草や木が雪景色のような白く、青空は黒く、可視光線とはちがった幻想的なJAPANIMISMアートを創り出しています。