YAMBARU ART FESTIVAL
2023-2024

ART PROGRAM

Tale of unborn

In the Kojiki, there is a story about Ogetsuhime and Susanoo. In it, there is a depiction of food being born from excrement.
There is also a Buddhist painting called "Kusouzu," which depicts the process of destruction of a discarded body.
Although each of these two paintings may have their own message or purpose, to me they both depict the birth of something sacred out of something abhorrent, or a decaying life giving birth to a plant as a new life, in other words, a dead thing sustaining the next living thing.
In other words, it seems to me to represent the cycle of life, in which what dies sustains what lives next.
Does it excite or horrify you to think that flowers will grow on your rotting corpse when you die?
When we, as individual human beings, finish our lives, will we be able to connect something to the next new life someday?
By the way, here in Yanbaru, there is a festival in which people and plants become one and act as an intermediary between the sea and the mountains.
This festival, called "Sinugu," has been preserved in the Yasuda area, and tells a large scale story of plants, people, the sea, and mountains becoming one.
In conjunction with the "Tale of unborn" exhibition, I would like to introduce a part of Sinugu that I saw.

PROFILE

Atsunobu Katagiri

PROFILE

Iemoto of the Misasagi school of flower arrangement. After graduating from junior high school, studied in the U.S. and returned to Japan in 1994. In 2005, he opened "Mondo Shobo" in Sakai City, which is both a school and a gallery, and has been involved in a wide range of activities, including the discovery, exhibition, and publication of young artists. In 2015, he published "SACRIFICE - Mirai ni Eigo, Rebirth Ikebana" (Seigensha), in which he visited Fukushima after the Great East Japan Earthquake and created and photographed works to convey his wish for regeneration in the areas surrounding the nuclear power plant. His works range in style from small wildflowers to contemporary art-like installations, and his aim is to delve into the animistic aspect of ikebana as its origin, and to unravel the relationship between plants and humans from a cultural anthropological perspective. His activities center on solo exhibitions and workshops in Japan and abroad.