Beauties of Nature
When you encounter beautiful scenes of grand nature, there are no words. Awestruck, you stand in silence. Kachogetsuro (花鳥月露) – literally translated as "a bird lands on a tree, a dew dropping down on the night with a moon in the sky," is a traditional Japanese idiom that describes beautiful sceneries of nature in motion. Yamaguchi captured those encounters and the embrace of nature through her five senses vividly and completely, and transcribed them into a poem. This exhibition is the result of expressing the scene into the scene into a single character, and drawing each character as a contemporary single-character calligraphy art (一字書).
The artist, who grew up surrounded by the magnificent nature of Hokkaido, has her respect and reverence for nature deeply engraved within herself, and imbues it into calligraphy art. The poem, written by the artist, concludes with “There I am, my heart is.” It speaks to us that Kachogetsuro exists precisely because we have the heart to appreciate the beauty of the natural world.
山はそこに聳え立ち
天にひとすじの霞
雨上がりの霽月の宵
樹々は瑞々し
馨しい風に
湖面に漣立つ
飛沫高く濤うつ海
わたしの心は、そこに
-
A soaring mountain,
A stroke of mist in the sky,
The moon shining on the rain-cleansed night,
The lush, vibrant green of the trees,
Swaying in the fragrant wind,
Makes the ripples on the lake,
The waves surging in the ocean,
And there I am, my heart is.
