Yoko Ozawa
Bulleke-bek garden reflection 2023

installation, ceramic reflection vases, kiln bricks, plants, stones and water
size varies

Copyright of the artist

It is about taking the time and care to create a moment of inner calm: to live by wakei-seijiyaku is to linger, to notice, to be present. 

– Mari Fujimoto

Mid-way through her residency, Yoko presented Bulleke-bek garden reflection 2023. Featuring her charcoal Reflection Vases 2016 with delicate kintsugi* details, the artist installed a collection of autumnal leaves, grass, weeds and river stones gathered from around her home and studio. 

The work was conceived as a study of yohaku no bi (the beauty of blank space) and the related idea of fukinesei (asymmetry) that brought together the artist’s interests in seasonal transitions, water reflection and the Japanese art of garden design and aspects of Ikebana (flower arranging).

On the installation day, photographer Annika Kafcaloudis observed the artist at work, capturing the act of making. In this way, the installation is also an expression of wakei-seijyaku, what the psycholinguist Mari Fujimoto describes as ‘a crafted tranquil moment’:

It is about taking the time and care to create a moment of inner calm: to live by wakei-seijiyaku is to linger, to notice, to be present. 

In the exhibition space, visitors were invited to linger and enjoy a cup of Japanese tea as they looked out at the garden in the centre of the room. 

Many of the hallmarks of ikebana were present - a beautiful, natural asymmetry, the use of autumnal leaves, signposting the transience of the seasons and the dry grass, a reminder of the cycle of life - birth, growth, decay and reincarnation. 

At the same time, the dry grass, with flowering seeds intact, called to mind the Indigenous grasses found along the Merri Merri; and the green grass reminiscent of overgrown nature strips made it an evocative, place-specific rumination of urban life in Bulleke-bek (Brunswick).

In the work, as in all Japanese gardens, there is a balance between natural and human-made beauty. In Japanese culture, it is the garden maker’s chief aspiration to produce an act of reflection in the visitor, most often through a mirror pond (kyoko-chi).

As the designer, horticulturist, author and lecturer, Sophie Walker writes: 

Reliant on stillness, the watery reflection of a pond is fragile and constantly threatened. At any moment, wind or rain might unmake the scene completely, shattering the image into a scene of chaos in which no clarity of order is possible, while in winter, the pond might become frozen with ice and snow. Solid and unreflective, the surface ice is water turned white and transformed. The Japanese garden pivots on the possibility of transformation. The garden is ever-changing; what the visitor has seen before will not be seen again.  

The reflection vases, offered for sale here, act in place of a kyoko-chi and bring this same sense of the possibility for transformation. In the gallery setting, the water’s surface in the vases is transformed through light and sound that spills in from Sydney Road as the viewer looks on. In the act of self-reflection, no two experiences are the same. It calls to mind a quote, a question, also the name of a recent exhibition by American artist and writer Roni Horn, whose work Yoko admires:

When you see your reflection in water, do you recognize the water in you?

—Emma Thomson, correspondences

Notes:—

* Kintsugi meaning ‘joining with gold’ is a 500-year-old tradition in Japan where lacquer mixed with powdered gold is used to repair broken pottery to highlight rather than hide imperfections. It is part of a broader philosophy of wabi-sabi, which embraces the notion that nothing is perfect, complete or immortal. In human life and all of nature, instead, beauty comes from what is fragile and flawed. 

Fujimoto, 2019: Mari Fujimoto, ikigai & other Japanese words to live by, London: Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2019, pp. 22, 26, 27
Walker, 2017: Sophie Walker, The Japanese Garden, Great Britain: Phaidon, 2017, pp. 94-95.