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Look closely. This is a 21st century “Landscape Painting”.
Artist Mr.Yamada, took his inspiration from the fact that the countless buildings you can see from the room change their appearance depending on the time and the season, and are never the same at any one moment. This painting, which takes “The Folding Screen of Landscape with the Sun and Moon” at Kongoji Temple, Osaka, as its motif, is a landscape painting which changes and glimmers with the passage of time.*
On one wall, when viewed from afar, there are the lines of a mountain ridge; but if you look closely, there are countless animals living there. Then there is a “spring wall” on which you can see cherry trees in the daylight, and an “autumn wall” which has the color of autumn leaves in the evening. A pine forest at night covered in snow shines coldly, but the light of a summer morning dazzles everywhere. This is a beautiful room like a folding screens painted with mountains and oceans, day and night, and spring, summer, autumn and winter. We invite you to relax with the wall paintings in the “Artist Room of Landscapes”.
*To create this room, the artist first penciled images on the walls which had been painted with an undercoat, and then colored parts of them with different colors. The result is that the walls look completely different depending on the light.
Room #3109 | Completion Date: March 2015
When you gaze out at the clusters of Tokyo buildings from this room, they each have a richness of adetail, and it you look at them carefully, they change with the time and season, as if you can feel the vibrance of the people inside them. The landscape changes at every moment, and fascinated, you eventually forget all about time. This gave me an inspiration.
Landscape painting, a school of Oriental painting that had its origins in China, is a way of depicting nature. Here, what I painted in this room on the theme of landscape, is based on the motif, “Landscapes with the Sun and Moon” in Kongoji Temple in Osaka. “Landscapes with the Sun and Moon” is a landscape painting in the characteristic Japanese style, but it does not show a specific location, rather it evokes the landscape of Japan in the artist’s mind – mountains and forests where gods live, waterfalls, the ocean, day and night, and the four seasons on a pair of folding screens. The folding screens, bathed in natural light coming in from the side of the porch, and illuminated at night by candles, vividly expressed the idea that we are one with nature. That was my clue. I tried to create a work which would be in perfect harmony with the rich landscape outside the window.
I paid special attention to the differences between the whole and the parts, and to the change in appearance over time.
Junji Yamada
Born in 1974 in Nagano, Japan
Graduated from the Graduate School of Aichi Prefectural University of Fine Arts and Music.
Presently resides in Nagoya City, Aichi Prefecture, Japan.
He is a contemporary artist who questions the very nature of painting itself with works which take a tremendous amount of time to complete. He makes dioramas (3D models) of masterpieces (2D) such as “The Lady and the Unicorn” (Tokyo Station Gallery collection), Bosch, “Pleasure garden” (Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art), Monet, “Water Lilies”, and Sesshu, “Autumn and Winter Landscapes”, and photographs them (2D). He prints copper plates from the photos and coats them with resin. The results are then exhibited in a series entitled: “On Painting”.
