Yoshinori Mizutani

“Cherry blossoms are so beautiful

that I don’t think I’ve spent as much

time looking at anything else

Facing a sakura tree

my eyes shift

from one petal to another

from one flower to another

until the whole picture is grasped

In ‘SAKURA’

I attempt to visualize

the move of my observing eyes

and crystallize the visual experience

of meditating and wandering upon

the blooming tree

As a result

the images show that

photography captures not only

a specific moment

but also the passing of time”

– Yoshinori Mizutani

‘When I first saw hundreds of parakeets swarming the sky, I was struck by fear. I felt as if I’d walked into the Alfred Hitchcock film The Birds. Every morning, flocks of several parakeets each would fly to the elm tree near my home in Tokyo’s Setagaya ward. I watched these flocks arrive daily. Eventually, more and more flocks showed until finally, this strange scene of hundreds of parakeets appeared. […] These tropical birds were incongruous with the Tokyo environment and I found their appearance disturbing. I did some research and found out that these parakeets were brought to Japan in the 1960s and 1970s from tropical regions in India and Sri Lanka to be sold as pets. They had since gone wild and made Tokyo their home. […] Shocked by my encounter of the parakeets, I chased them for about a year afterwards. […] I used strobes to photograph the parakeets in the evenings, when they went home. These parakeets aren’t supposed to exist in Tokyo, but they do. And it’s the intensely uncanny feeling I felt when I first saw the swarm, which I’ve captured in these photographs.’ – Yoshinori Mizutani

‘Nature was always part of my childhood. Surrounded by mountains, with young leaves and flowers on the trees, fireflies around the creeks, red dragonflies flying over rice paddies, it turns into a silvery world when snow falls; a place with bountiful nature, that is where I grew up. I moved to Tokyo when I was eighteen, and for almost ten years since then, I sincerely sought nature. I went to parks and rivers. I found myself in nature, pulled into it without realizing it. Perhaps I was unconsciously catching sight of my original landscape from childhood by facing nature. Or perhaps, it is only natural for us to seek nature. As I conversed with and observed nature, I came across the buzzer midge, or yusurika in Japanese. Yusurikas inhabit freshwater areas such as rivers and ponds in groups, sometimes forming swarms. Reflecting the flash of the camera, each yusurika turns into a small white ball of light, and transforms into something fantastical, like fairies existing in the natural world. To listen to the words of nature and capture them in photographs. I believe I will continue to take myself to nature looking for its words. I put the pure feelings from and for nature into these works.’ – Yoshinori Mizutani

Using strobe light and long exposure, Yoshinori Mizutani photographed the pine trees in his neighbourhood at midnight, the trees barely visible in the darkness. In this composition, the space is shared equally by the rich golden sky and the pine trees, reminiscent of the ink and gold paintings of the Kano School, which dominated Japanese art from the late 15th century to the mid-19th century. Harking back to traditional Japanese art, Mizutani explores the relationship between negative and positive spaces.