- 'LANDSCAPE SUICIDE' Masako Yasuki
I have always painted landscapes, and my work is always of places I have actually visited. I have never really considered myself as a 'landscape artist', though, and I did not set out with the aim of becoming an 'artist' or 'painter'. Rather, I see painting as a tool that enables people, including myself, to sense an alternative way of apprehending the world. Usually, what we believe we see, we don't actually see, and through painting I try to break through this assumption that what we think we see is really there. I want to find what really exists for the eye in a landscape when the controls and filters of a mind influenced by culture and society have been stripped away.
This stems from skepticism toward the notion that we are of a progressive civilization, or that the development of mankind is at a turning point, which became obvious in the mid-90s and continues to develop to the present. My response is to employ the pre-modern technique of painting on larger-than-life screens with tempera and oil as a way of continually contemplating the relationship between landscape and humankind.
The Western concept of ‘landscape’, when introduced to Japan, was translated as fu-kei. The concepts of landscape and fu-kei are not identical, however, and as a result the meaning of the word fu-kei has shifted with time. For example, the concept of sansui, which literally means 'mountains and water', used to come under the umbrella of fu-kei. However, over the years, sansui has become a separate entity. Consequently, people no longer consider 'mountains and water' as an integral component of fu-kei as it once was. This semantic drift of the word fu-kei has resulted in the gradual loss of a pre-Humanist perception of the relationship between people and the landscape, where the former is subsumed within the latter.
One way in which we may grasp the meaning of chaotic fu-kei prior to its association with landscape is through the awe one senses from a position of insignificance and vulnerability within it. From here we may come to doubt and dissolve the historic perspective that encourages attempts to frame, time and control landscape, and perhaps in doing so we might find clues to a better relationship with our environment.