Knowing Place in Dorogawa

My participation in MIND TRAIL Oku-Yamato Museum in Your Mind in Tenkawa, Nara, in 2021 led me to consider how the scenery before us is recognised as landscape. While listening to stories connected with the area, I became interested in mitate: the act of perceiving one thing as another. Through mitate, an unfamiliar “something” is recognised as a particular thing and begins to acquire meaning.

Here I saw the mountains of Tenkawa, long traversed, cherished and feared by those who lived among them. I regarded the upright trees and moss-covered fallen trunks as mountain ranges and placed several fields of colour through the forest. The gradation from green to blue and white abstractly evokes mountains, sky, and the vapour and mist rising from the forest after rain.

I continued to visit Dorogawa after Ridgeline as Seen, thinking about the vapour and mist rising from the mountains after rain. Walking there, I noticed moisture lifting from trees, moss, stones and soil, while vapour seemed to emerge from my own body in much the same way.

Through repeated conversations, I began to think that moisture in the air trembles like a wave as it touches the surface of the body—the skin—and that this sensation may be one way we recognise where we are.

In this work, contour lines indicating the mountains of Dorogawa are drawn directly onto the building’s glass as waves. “Surface” here refers not to the glass but to the surface of our bodies as they come into contact with the environment.