Hosoo Gallery is pleased to present the exhibition Garden and Textile: The Shades of Shadows. The show puts on views a multidisciplinary installation consisting of textiles, video, and sound, created in collaboration with Rurihiko Hara, a scholar of Japanese gardens and nohgaku, the architectural design studio Altemy, and the Nishijin-ori textile artisans of Hosoo, with Japanese garden as its theme.

In collaboration with Hara’s Garden Archives Project,* the tsuboniwa [small indoor garden] at the House of Hosoo textile studio in Nishijin, Kyoto, was recorded in a variety of formats, including a 12-month 3D scan. We spent about three years regularly discussing and experimenting, in an effort to translate the collected data into a textile that would reflect the ever-changing appearance of the garden.

Textiles and gardens have existed in many cultures since ancient times. Both are spatial and physical devices that reconfigure elements of nature. As exemplified by karesansui [dry gardens], Japanese gardens are created with rocks that do not change over time, while ponds, streams, trees, flowers, and grasses are arranged to present a different view each season. Textiles, too, have been made from natural materials and dyed with natural dyes since ancient times. The patterns on them are also derived from the natural world. Textiles, like gardens, are composed of different layers of time. Like rocks in a garden, the warp is synchronic, whereas the weft is a diachronic element like plants, trees, and flowers that transform the appearance of a textile by incorporating threads of different colors one by one.

The textiles in this exhibition use special foil yarns, so that the weft does not have a single color. Colors appear only when the viewer examines the textiles under special lighting from different viewpoints. The yarn is a result of “Ambient Weaving,” the joint research and development project that Hosoo has been conducting since 2020 in collaboration with the Kakehi Yasuaki Lab., the University of Tokyo, and Zozo Next, Inc. It gives the textile a dynamic appearance that changes with the chromatic phenomena. This exhibition will present a new perspective on gardens and textiles through an installation featuring video and textiles, presenting a garden in which diverse layers of time, light and shadow, and stillness and movement, intersect.

* The Garden Archives Project is a research initiative focusing on niwa (Japanese gardens), which have developed in diverse ways as an interface between people and the natural environment since ancient times. The Project seeks to propose a new interpretation of Japanese gardens based on their history.
Incomplete Niwa Archives: https://special.ycam.jp/niwa/