Nirvana: Fleeting Flower Shimmering Light
Nirvana: Fleeting Flower Shimmering Light
Fleeting Flower series. Everything exists miraculously and precariously in the boundless continuity of life that continues for a long, long time.
The world of the artwork is depicted by flowers that repeat the cycle of life and death. The flowers that are born eventually wither, but they scatter as soon as people touch them. When the flowers scatter, the world fades away.
Itō Jakuchū (1716–1800) was an early modern Japanese painter who was active in Kyoto in the mid-Edo period. Jakuchū has left us with a unique style of painting in which the surface is made up of a grid of tens of thousands of squares that are individually colored. Nirvana was inspired by the screen paintings Birds, Animals, and Flowering Plants and Trees, Flowers, Birds and Animals.
In these paintings several different colors are used for each square to create a pattern within the square. It appears as if Jakuchū understood optical mixing of colors at a time before Impressionism and Pointillism.
In this artwork, plants and animals are created as three-dimensional objects in a virtual three-dimensional space, and this space is turned into a video work that uses Ultrasubjective Space. Then, the color in the three dimensional space is split by the color pattern of the squares. For example, if the pattern of a square is colored in red and blue, that part corresponds to purple in the three dimensional space.
As the animals move while the flowers on the screen remain fixed, the coloring of the flowers moves on a different time axis to the space of the artwork. When viewed as a whole from a distance, the bright colors created by visual mixing represent the world of plants and animals in a space moving on a slow time axis. When viewed up close, the highly saturated colors broken down by the lines that draw the flowers represent the world of flowers changing on a fast time axis. The faint sparkle on the work represents a world between the viewer and the world of the work, which changes on the time axis of the viewer's own physical movements. Three space-times overlap.