Photography: Yasushi Ichikawa
(C) Art Front Gallery Co., Ltd.
Photography: Yasushi Ichikawa
(C) Art Front Gallery Co., Ltd.
Photography: Yasushi Ichikawa
(C) Art Front Gallery Co., Ltd.
2024
ヒルトン京都
Hilton Kyoto
Hilton Kyoto (Kyoto)
Panel, cotton cloth, soil from various locations in Kyoto, acrylic paints, watercolors, and other materials.
Six paintings, one installation.
Ordered by: ART FRONT GALLERY
2024
ヒルトン京都
Hilton Kyoto
Hilton Kyoto (Kyoto)
Panel, cotton cloth, soil from various locations in Kyoto, acrylic paints, watercolors, and other materials.
Six paintings, one installation.
Ordered by: ART FRONT GALLERY
Photography: Yasushi Ichikawa
(C) Art Front Gallery Co., Ltd.
Photography: Yasushi Ichikawa
(C) Art Front Gallery Co., Ltd.
At Hilton Kyoto, I created seven commissioned works, including paintings and videos, for the entrance lobby, executive lounge, and guest rooms. The works focus on the scenery surrounding the hotel, depicting not only the current landscape but also the layered timeline dating back to the Heian period. By focusing on the traces of human activity and nature accumulated beneath Kyoto, and using soil collected from Karasuma Oike, Kamo River, various temples and shrines, and even the construction site, I developed a pictorial expression that visualizes the intersection of time and landscape.
Yoshitaka Nanjo's commissioned work at Hilton Kyoto is an attempt to transform the hotel space from a place of stay into a place of thought connected to the temporal layers of the city. The seven paintings and video works placed in the entrance lobby, executive lounge, and guest rooms, starting from the surrounding landscape, visualize the historical time that the city of Kyoto has inherently contained in a multi-layered way.
Nanjo does not treat landscapes as fixed images, but rather as "cross-sections of time" where traces of human activity and nature accumulated in the land overlap. The fact that strata from the Heian period remain about two meters underground in Kyoto becomes a symbolic reference point in this work, forming an axis of thought that connects the current urban landscape with the invisible past. In addition to locations such as Karasuma Oike, Kamo River, Chion-in Temple, Toyokuni Shrine, and Nanzen-ji Temple, soil collected from the site during the construction of the hotel is used in the painting, with the material itself playing a role in mediating time.
Rather than presenting a clear narrative to the viewer, these works quietly draw attention to the depths of the city within the everyday act of staying there. Nanjo's paintings evoke memories specific to the place and function as a critical device for reconsidering time and landscape within the contemporary luxury hotel space.