Showing 8 posts tagged Japanese
We love artist Theo Jansen’s Strandbeests, and as it turns out, so does Mythbuster Adam Savage. Watch Adam describe and build a Japanese-made Strandbeest Model Kit. These advanced building kits can be found on Amazon, Ebay, and MakerShed.
(Psst… you can also find one of the Strandbeest kit’s instructions pdf’d here in English.)
From the New Yorker, watch a video of Theo Jansen’s Strandbeests here.
Reincarnation, an animation from Japanese illustrator Chie Miyazaki.
via Youngna.
Related watching: USAWALTZ by Asami Ike.
USAWALTZ, animation and music by Tokyo-born Asami Ike.
Both kids were laughing as they watched the rabbits journey across all of the animals that floated by, and we’ve been humming the music ever since. Clearly we loved this video. If you do, too, you might also enjoy one of our favorite books, Wonder Bear by Tao Nyeu, a Tinybop recommendation.
Japanese artist Motoi Yamamoto creates intricate temporary installations using salt — an essential material for both the human body and the ocean. He pours the tiny grains into images that look very different far away than they do up close — maze-like, lace-like, map-like, nature-like, and tempest-like patterns that are specially designed for the installation space, and then are swept up by gallery patrons returned to the sea at the end of the exhibitions.
His inspiration came from grief:
The mainspring of my work is derived from the death of my sister from brain cancer… Since then, I have had the dilemma, in grief and surprise, of thinking about what I had and lost. I started making art works that reflected such feelings and continue it as if I were writing a diary. Many of my works take the form of labyrinths with complicated patterns, ruined and abandoned staircases or too narrow life-size tunnels, and all these works are made with salt. A common perception towards them is “nearly reachable, yet not quite” or “nearly conceivable, yet not quite”…
Drawing a labyrinth with salt is like following a trace of my memory. Memories seem to change and vanish as time goes by. However, what I sought for was the way in which I could touch a precious moment in my memories which cannot be attained through pictures or writings. What I look for at the end of the act of drawing could be a feeling of touching a precious memory.
For a deeper dive, this 12 minute documentary by John Reynolds & Lee Donaldson explores Yamamoto’s breathtaking work further.
h/t This Is Colossal.
Google “Jigokudani Yaen-koen” and you will happen upon many relaxing (and adorable) Snow Monkeys, or Japanese macaques, who live in the famous monkey park in the Nagano Prefecture of Japan.
The heavy snowfalls (snow covers the ground for 4 months a year), an elevation of 850 meters, and being only accessible via a narrow two kilometer footpath through the forest, keep it uncrowded despite being relatively well-known… Starting in 1963, the monkeys descend from the steep cliffs and forest to sit in the warm waters of the onsen (hotsprings), and return to the security of the forests in the evenings.
Next stop: this BBC Wildlife video feature, which explains more backstory about the wild monkeys’ hot spring spa and, well, shows a lot of macaques! Reason enough.
h/t This Is Colossal.
