Jacqueline Hassink: View, Kyoto. On Japanese Gardens and Temples

Jacqueline Hassink’s View, Kyoto. On Japanese Gardens and Temples concerns a relation that is easy to overlook: the one between a building and the ground it faces. Photographing inside Kyoto’s temples, Hassink recorded the surrounding traditional gardens from within the structures, giving interior and exterior comparable weight rather than treating the garden as scenery beyond a threshold. In two of the temples she was permitted to move the sliding rice-paper screens, creating new and far larger spatial entities before making the exposure. The moss garden of Saiho-ji and the cherry blossoms at Haradani-in form further centres of the series.

These scenes change with the seasons, and Hassink calls them “living sculptures.” What concerns her is the aesthetics that produced them, in which an arranged garden is understood at once as an artificial likeness of nature and as a representation of paradise. Seen from inside the buildings, the garden is less a subject set apart than the space the room is arranged to face.

Published by Hatje Cantz in September 2014, the book runs to 204 pages and carries 311 photographs. The texts are by Hassink, with a contribution by Gert van Tonder; the design is credited to Irma Boom Office. It is an English-language hardcover of 289 by 354 millimetres, issued in connection with an exhibition at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam, that opened on 13 September 2014.

For a collector, the interest lies in the conception of the series and in what its making required: work inside particular temple interiors, and in two cases permission to move the screens and so to alter the rooms. The Kyoto photographs belong to Hassink’s longer, multipart inquiry into how the interior and exterior spaces of individual structures permeate or face one another, and here that question is put to architecture whose rice-paper screens can be rearranged. The 2014 exhibition gives the project a dated public context; the book gathers the series in one hardcover volume.

Hassink (*1966 in Enschede) commenced working on a multipart, enticingly beautiful series in which she examines how the interior and exterior spaces of individual structures permeate or face one another. She took photographs of the surrounding traditional Japanese gardens from within the buildings, placing equal weight on both areas. In two of the temples she was allowed to move sliding rice-paper screens for the purpose of creating new, enormous spatial entities. The moss gardens of Saiho-ji and the cherry blossoms in Haradani-in constitute a further focus of the series. These scenes, which change with the seasons—Hassink calls them “living sculptures”—reflect Japanese aesthetics, which see both an artificial likeness of nature as well as representations of paradise in arranged gardens.
 
Ausstellung/Exhibition: Huis Marseille, Amsterdam, opening 13.9.2014
 

Beiträge von: Gert van Tonder
Designed by: Irma Boom Office
Texts by: Jacqueline Hassink
English
September 2014, 204 Pages , 311 Photos
hardcover
289mm x 354mm
ISBN:978-3-7757-3910-8

Publisher page editorial text:
Hassink (*1966 in Enschede) commenced working on a multipart, enticingly beautiful series in which she examines how the interior and exterior spaces of individual structures permeate or face one another. She took photographs of the surrounding traditional Japanese gardens from within the buildings, placing equal weight on both areas. In two of the temples she was allowed to move sliding rice-paper screens for the purpose of creating new, enormous spatial entities. The moss gardens of Saiho-ji and the cherry blossoms in Haradani-in constitute a further focus of the series. These scenes, which change with the seasons—Hassink calls them “living sculptures”—reflect Japanese aesthetics, which see both an artificial likeness of nature as well as representations of paradise in arranged gardens.
 
Ausstellung/Exhibition: Huis Marseille, Amsterdam, opening 13.9.2014

Publisher source ↗