“First, I am not dealing with the object. Perception is the object. Secondly, I am dealing with no image, because I want to avoid associative, symbolic thought. Thirdly, I am dealing with no focus or particular place to look. With no object, no image and no focus, what are you looking at? You are looking at yourself looking.” (James Turrell)

In 2003 a small museum/guesthouse was built in the misty mountains of Niigata in Japan’s north by the Californian light artist James Turrell. Calling it The House of Light, Turrell approached the commission for the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial as a response to Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s seminal essay In Praise of Shadows, which was written in the 1920’s as an ode to nuance, darkness and the aesthetic of the unseen in traditional Japanese architecture and art.

Turrell has been working with light, space and perception as his subject matter and his media since the 1960’s, and has often spoken of how his work has been informed from an early stage by Japanese aesthetics and Zen philosophy. The main feature of the House of Light is the Skyspace, part of an ongoing body of work where the artist brings our gaze up to the wide blue yonder. A square is cut out of the roof, framing the ubiquitous sky and rendering it strangely flat and within reach. The celestial is brought to the domestic as the huge volume of the atmosphere is compressed in a two dimensional layer on the ceiling – without context or reference, our sky becomes abstracted and we see its ever evolving colours and forms in entirely new ways.

The accommodation is no frills, with a basic kitchen and traditional futon on tatami mat bedding: the focus is on the opportunity to experience the Skyspace at its best, during dusk and dawn. Every day, guests are awoken at some point between three and four AM as the roof opens itself up to a square of starry night sky which ever so gradually turns itself from black to blue. At the end of the day the reverse is silently played out as the sun sets and the sky subtly shifts to complete darkness. Dusk and dawn are thresholds where the Japanese beauty of mono no aware (found in the ‘sadness of things passing’) is heightened, bringing to mind the fourteenth century monk Yoshida Kenko’s remark that “in all things, it is the beginnings and ends that are interesting.”

Turrell is very much big in Japan. Besides the House of Light he also has site-specific works on the art-covered island of Naoshima, including Minamidera “Backside of the Moon”, an immersive space built in collaboration with architect Tadao Andō that explores seeing in darkness, as well as a series of examples from different stages of Turrell’s career on permanent display in Andō’s submerged Chichu Musuem. The artist had a large retrospective exhibition at the Art Tower Mito and has works held in collections at several major museums around Japan including the 21st Century Museum of Modern Art, Kanazawa. At long last a Turrell Skyspace is also now underway in Australia, with the NGA’s major new commission Within without set to open this spring.

It should be said that Turrell’s art doesn’t translate well to photographs and is best experienced live ­- as experiential live works. In the artist’s words “my work is not about my seeing, it is about your seeing. There is no one between you and your experience. It is non-vicarious art.”

First two photographs courtesy House of Light, others by Amelia Groom.

Anyone who says you don’t find straight lines in nature needs to be straightened out. Besides many naturally rectilinear cell and crystal formations, straight lines are to be found in such ubiquitous things as rays of light and gravity’s pull. Since the time of ancient Egypt small weights on strings have been used to mark true vertical lines. Today in place of plump bobs carpenters use laser beams, and it was at a construction site that architect Hiroshi Naito was first taken by the beauty of straight lines of light projected on a rough concrete surface.

When he was invited to do an installation for MOMAT’s current Where Is Architecture? exhibition, he decided to return to this image. In an otherwise completely dark room, 200 straight, parallel red laser beams form a rectangle on the floor. It is a curious property of light that we only see it in what it illuminates. In transit it is invisible, but when it reaches a surface it can appear to have its own mass. Looking at the red lines on the floor it is unclear whether we are seeing an object or image.

Forms appear abruptly from the darkness as people pass through the beams, so the ways in which bodies inform space and architecture are literally brought to light. There is an interplay of two-dimensionality and three-dimensionality as the flat lines respond to the contours of the human forms moving through them, and to fully exploit this several dance performances with JunJun SCIENCE and Hiroaki Umeda are scheduled throughout the exhibition.

“We find beauty not in the thing itself but in the pattern of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates.”

Written in the 1930’s, Jun’ichirō Tanizaki essay In Praise of Shadows was a sort of defense for traditional Japanese aesthetics, which he saw as being under threat from the excessively lit modern world. All the highly refined traditional Japanese arts – such as laquerware or noh theatre – he said, should be appreciated under dim lights, but as the West is forever striving for progress it searches for greater clarity and more dazzling light. Despite all the flashing neon and lasers of Japan today, Jun’ichirō might actually be pleasantly surprised to find that the Japanese still hold that particular sensitivity to subdued aesthetics, and the quality of the subtle interplay between light and shadows has not, as he feared, been forgotten.

A recent exhibition at the National Art Center Tokyo placed the work of abstract painter Yoko Matsumoto (b. 1936) and photographer Rika Noguchi (b. 1971) side by side in a show called The Light. Though from different generations, both of these contemporary artists have been primarily concerned with the difficult challenge of capturing light, either in paint or on film. Matsumoto painted exclusively with pink acrylics for several decades before recently moving to green tones and oil paints, and her large-scale canvases have a textured luminosity that is lost in the reproductions here. Noguchi works exclusively with natural light in her photography, often directly documenting the biggest light of them all, the sun, with a pinhole camera. The show received some criticism for putting these two seemingly disconnected artists together under the possibly tenuous link of ‘capturing light’, but it served as an interesting documentation of the great sensitivity to light that still runs strong in contemporary Japan.

[Image credits: 1. Copyright Rika Noguchi. 2. Yoko Matsumoto, Light Shining in Wilderness I, 1992, acrylic on canvas, 182x182 cm,photo: YAMAMOTO Tadasu, courtesy of Hino Gallery. 3. Rika Noguchi, The Sun #23, 2008, C-print, 40.3x60.3 cm, courtesy the artist and Gallery Koyanagi. 3. Yoko Matsumoto, Light Shining on the Horizon, 2008, oil on canvas, 193x259 cm, photo: YAMAMOTO Tadasu, courtesy of Hino Gallery. 4. Rika Noguchi, I Dreamt of Flying 2 #1, 2009, C-print, 125x187.5cm, courtesy artist and Gallery Koyanagi.]