WORKS

From March 12 to April 16, 2011, a solo exhibition by Yoshitaka Nanjo titled "Kiskei ~Ise Pilgrimage 2~" was held at Yukari Art Contemporary.

 Yoshitaka Nanjo is an artist who has consistently created fieldwork-style landscape paintings using "earth" itself as his material, with perception based on physical experience as the foundation of his work. He has a strong interest in the art of the late Edo period, when landscape painting including customs flourished most in Japanese art history, as well as the history of popular religion during the Edo period. He maintains an approach of verifying, through his own body, how these primal landscape elements remain in the landscapes of modern Japan. To date, he has dealt with religious views, customs, and landscape consciousness that have been formed in conjunction with the movement and pilgrimages of the Japanese people through themes such as "Mount Fuji Climbing (Fuji-ko)," "Koshu Kaido (Edo Five Highways)," "Tokyo Bay (Edo-mae Culture)," "Kumano Kodo (Nature Worship)," and "Ise Pilgrimage (Shinto and Edo Travel Culture)." Nanjo views the formation of landscape painting in Japan as inseparable from the act of walking, and starts his work by actually walking to the site and observing and classifying the townscapes and mountain views.

 Furthermore, Nanjo avoids filling the canvas with excessive information and creating narrative-driven images, instead exploring the possibility of landscape painting that evokes sensations with just enough information to barely reach the viewer's perception. As a result, his works may appear simple at first glance, but the production process is extremely complex and contains a sophisticated structure.

 During the creative process, the artist selects a landscape to photograph, simultaneously collecting soil that strongly embodies the atmosphere of the place. The photographic images are repeatedly deconstructed through hand-drawn sketches and digital processing, reducing the landscape to its constituent elements. Meanwhile, the collected soil is sifted and sorted into particles of a similar size to pigments. Based on these resulting images, layers of analog depictions using soil and acrylic paints are added to a white-painted cotton cloth. Through this process, a landscape that surpasses the actual location, or even a completely different landscape, emerges on the canvas, creating a space where opposing elements such as soil and paint, digital and analog, coexist in a state of tension.

 This exhibition is positioned as the second and final stage in a series of attempts based on the "Ise Pilgrimage," which takes place from Nihonbashi to Ise Grand Shrine. The first installment, "Saikei ~Ise Pilgrimage 1~," held from the end of 2009 to the beginning of 2010, dealt with the journey from Nihonbashi to Fukuroi, a post town midway along the Tokaido road. This exhibition focuses on the section from Fukuroi to Ise Grand Shrine, and through approximately 10 new works, the relationship between pilgrimage and landscape, and between physical movement and perception, is presented in a more intensive manner.