In 2013, I created the rooftop sign artwork Your sky, my sky: sky project for Arts Maebashi as a commissioned work, coinciding with the opening of the contemporary art museum Arts Maebashi in Maebashi City. This piece was the result of a six-month dialogue that involved exchanging photographs of the sky with children living at a parenting support facility in Maebashi City. This marked the beginning of a deep connection with Maebashi, leading me to participate in the group exhibition Forest of expression: art as a communal act (2016) and the solo exhibition The Earth is blue like a lemon (2020). Even today, I still visit Maebashi annually to conduct workshops at this parenting support facility, a collaboration that has continued for 19 years. This exhibition at the Tomio Koyama Gallery Maebashi (Maebashi Galleria 2) marks a return to my origins. While reconnecting with Maebashi, I am presenting a show centered on my ongoing explorations of the sky and the color blue, featuring primarily new works and pieces that have not been previously exhibited.

In 1991, when I first traveled from Japan to Italy, the moment I closed the shutter toward the sky marked the beginning of my Sky series. For over 30 years since then, I have continued on this long journey devoted to exploring the color blue and the sky. This exploration is not merely about the reproduction of color or landscape, but rather a practice that seeks to open up one’s sensations and sense of existence in a deep and profound way.

The color blue breathes tangibly on the surface of pigment and paper, even while it also beckons us toward a profundity that lies beyond our reach. It is a color that evokes memories of the ocean and the universe, allowing us to experience a sense of both immersion and liberation at the same time. Through this blue, I have sought to depict the moment when a finite body comes into contact with an infinite expanse.

The sky appears within the images I photograph, draw, and compose. It is not merely a landscape, however: the sky is the very space that constantly envelops us, even as it also flows through us at the same time. It is here that individuals intersect with each other, and the world and I lose our boundaries. As the emptiness of Buddhism demonstrates, all existence manifests within a web of interdependence.1 “Blue” and “sky” resonate with each other: blue draws the depth of the sky into this world in a material form, while sky liberates blue from the dimension of color, guiding it towards a transcendent expanse. Both serve as pathways that bridge the material and immaterial, the finite and infinite, imagination and reality.

This exhibition seeks to share an experience where, at the moment when blue and sky intersect, finite and infinite, visible and invisible touch. It invites viewers to become enveloped by blue, opened up to the sky, and to transcend their own bodies and sensations. It also represents a “new way to connect with the world” that I have repeatedly sought through my work.

Angelo Capasso penned for my 2001 book of sky photography, Viaggio. Rereading that text after an interval of 25 years, I realized how perfectly it had already articulated a sense of my own journey and thinking, stirring in me a renewed sense of empathy. It seemed to me that this resonance was precisely what this exhibition deserved, leading me to borrow its title for this exhibition.

Concept behind the works

The color blue and the sky are not mere subjects to me. They represent the act of reaching towards the very roots of existence, and a starting point for contemplating life through art. Over the course of my long creative journey, I keep returning to these two images. For me, going back and forth between blue and sky represents the act of breathing that gives rise to works of art.

While blue manifests as a material substance within paint or photography, it acquires a kind of “invisible depth” each time it is layered. In these moments, blue ceases to be merely a color, and starts to take on the aura of an untouchable presence. As a finite being, this represents my attempt to reach for the infinite. In Spinozist terms, it is a movement where extension and thought run parallel to each other. The act of painting blue becomes a state where my body and mind resonate with nature as a whole.

The sky, too, lies at the center of my practice. It is not merely background or landscape, but the very “field” that envelops us, continuously generated as I breathe. The sky captured in drawings and photographs is not a fixed image. Like Henri Bergson’s notion of duration, it is a moving temporal entity that flows and changes, ceaselessly generated. The moment in which I gaze at the sky, it seems to me, is the “now” that embraces both past and future.

This experience of the sky resonates with the Buddhist concept of emptiness. All of existence consists not of fixed entities: instead, everything comes into being through “interdependent arising” and relationality. Looking at the sky does not entail a grasping of something substantial, but rather the act of “existence manifesting as a web of interrelationships.” For me, artistic depictions of the sky are not negations through nothingness, but rather affirmations as a result of “interdependent openness.” The images of the color blue and the sky in my work represent an attempt to make this web of relationality visible to the senses.

This exploration is also intricately intertwined with a number of art historical contexts. Similar to how Cy Twombly sought to touch the human spirit by reimagining the formal weight of Western art history with a line that was “childlike but not childish” in the light of the Mediterranean, I seek to create poetic spaces by playfully reconnecting different cultures and materials as a kind of “poetic practice that transcends form.” For me, the way that Lucio Fontana made openings into space with his “slashes” evoked entrances to the sky. In addition, the artistic depictions of ultramarine blue (gunjo) seen in works by Ito Jakuchu and Katsushika Hokusai, moreover, reveal how color transcends the act of mere reproduction and takes on a certain spirituality, demonstrating a playful expansiveness. In this sense, the color blue and sky in my work straddle both Western and Eastern traditions.

Blue and sky call out to and resonate with each other, going back and forth between themselves. Blue summons the sky, which in turn releases blue into infinity. Situated in the very center of this traversal, I seek to embody the “movement of becoming” in both philosophical and aesthetic terms even as I position myself as a finite being.

Through the act of layering blue in my paintings and drawings, I continue to explore the moment when a finite body seeks to touch the infinite. Furthermore, by photographing and depicting the sky, I attempt to visualize the traces left behind by time and breathing. While these endeavors are connected to the long lineage of art history, they originate from the context of my own everyday life. In other words, I evoke the color blue and the sky from the most personal and concrete of moments, while simultaneously bearing the weight of history.

For me, the color blue and the sky represent color, landscape, philosophy, breathing, and life itself. Perhaps what opens up to the viewer through my work is not just my own blue or sky, but the “entrance to infinity” contained within each individual being.

(Text by Satoshi Hirose)

Notes

1 I view Buddhism not as a religion, but rather as a kind of wisdom for living. According to the Buddhist concept of “emptiness” (sunyata), nothing in this world possesses an eternal, unchanging essence or intrinsic nature. All things exist only as a result of their dependence on many others: they are not understood to entail an independent existence in and of themselves. The wisdom that liberates us from stereotypes and attachments associated with specific things lies in not believing that they possess a fixed substance, not clinging to things thinking “this is who I am,” and instead cultivating a flexible mind that can accept and embrace change.