WORKS

The "Mount Fuji Climbing" exhibition was the final installment in a three-part solo exhibition series, following "Koshu Road" and "Tokyo Bay." What this series has in common is the artist's approach of examining landscapes through his own walking and reconsidering the nature of the land, which is deeply intertwined with the movement, beliefs, and lives of the Japanese people.

Yoshitaka Nanjo perceives landscape not as a visual object, but as a boundary realm where nature transforms into material, and material is perceived once again as landscape. In his creative process, he walks through cities and mountains, observing the points where nature transforms into landscape, the moments when colors and textures emerge, and selects specific locations. He then collects soil from these locations, sifts it, and layers it onto the canvas as a material equivalent to paint, thereby incorporating the materiality of the land into his works.

This exhibition is based on a mountain climb from Tagonoura at sea level, through the foothills of Mount Fuji, to Kengamine at an altitude of 3,776 meters. By physically reliving the act of climbing Mount Fuji, which attracted the faith and longing of ordinary people during the Edo period, the exhibition re-examines how the worship of nature and the memory of movement have been formed as landscapes.

This series of works is not an attempt to reproduce landscapes, but rather an attempt to present the conditions under which landscapes emerge through the very process of walking, collecting, and reconstructing. Through the symbolic setting of Mount Fuji, this series quietly reaches a point where the generative structure of the Japanese view of landscape becomes visible.