Venue: Bait Abdul Raheem Jasim

Karesansui. 2015
Site-specific installation with wooden platform
3.6 x 17 x 9 m
Commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation

The work of Taro Shinoda often explores humans’ relationship to nature, science and engineering. Formally trained in traditional Japanese gardening from a young age, Shinoda has always considered the ascetic philosophy of karesansui (dry landscape garden), with its unique roots in abstraction and nature, an inspiration for his art. Preserved and passed down for more than five hundred years, karesansui depicts nature through the selection and placement of rocks, trees, moss, gravel and sand, mediated through the passage of time.

In 2013–14, Shinoda made one hundred and eight landscape drawings in as many days to study the true essence of the garden. These drawings are on view in the Sharjah Art Museum. On his first visit to the Emirate of Sharjah, Shinoda was struck by an encounter with the desert, where sand and wind animated his field of vision.

For SB12 he has channelled this experience to actualise a garden based in the principles of Japanese dry landscape gardens but made of local materials. Housed within the walls of Bait Abdul Raheem Jasim, Karesansui includes an engawa, or shaded wooden platform, which designates the ideal viewing point of the garden’s slowly expanding voids and offers a calm space of contemplation.

See also his works at the
Sharjah Art Museum