This piece was conceived to be the first in the Japanology series.Japanology, set in a land where fortress-like skyscrapers jostle Edo-era relics, is a kaleidoscope of timespace shards, sometimes incongruent and at the same time in unique symphony with each other. The first piece of the series contains the strongest element of traditional Japanese art, making it Japanology's cornerstone.All seven pieces in the series strive for a prismatic effect through application of wa - a uniquely Japanese approach to harmony. The overall balance of the series is of utmost importance when combining the organic style of traditional painting with its parallel world digital counterpart to bring into focus visions of modular, near-future cityscapes.This piece is executed in the traditional style of taga sode byobu, or whose sleeves folding screen in direct translation. This niche genre in the byobu universe of paintings typically portrays a strikingly colored garment on a clothes rack in an empty, person-less space.Whose Sleeves? The question naturally brings to mind the kimono's absent owner.

MIYABI AND HINABI

This is a two-panel piece, where the left side represents miyabi, or elegance, and the right side stands for hinabi, or country. The effervescent buoyancy on the left is offset by the ponderous, tradition-laden inertia of the right side of the painting, giving rise to a gentler, all-embracing form of beauty.The countryside longs for the excitement of big city lights, while the restless conurbation is drawn to the groundedness of rural identity - a dichotomy that is becoming more pronounced in Japanese culture.Defying the genre's canon, the piece shows a sleeve in motion, as if by an irreverent gust of wind.

DRIP

In imitation of Tawaraya Sotatsu's 17th century tarashikomi technique of adding one color onto another while the first one is still wet, the KRINK paint popular with graffiti artists drips from the contour of the sleeve, melding into metal foil.

HEMLOCK FIR

The piece is grounded by a frame made from dense hemlock fir.Because of the painting's large size, the frame had to be cut to order by an artisan in Akita, in northern Japan.The frame confers a real world gravitas to the piece, making a physically imposing, heavy object.

This piece is titled Clepsydra/The Water Clock and shows the flow of time.
Your back is to the on-rushing roar of the future, time streams through grasping fingers into a vortex.
Standing in the center of the whirlpool, you are surrounded by afterimages of passions gentle and violent, the liquid mirror beaming back reflections of yourself in others.
The torrent's rapid flow curves, bends, melds every one thing and all into … the present.
The current rights itself, belying any change that was, streams forth to become the past. The present - always beyond grasp, the endless past unfolds into infinity. The future is an inevitability, yet always beyond the downstream gaze, the source of hope and unease in human heart.

MOTIF

"As a child I often visited our family's cottage in Hirasanso. It's no longer there, but the entrance door had a whirlpool design that I remember to this day," says Tetsuo Suzuka."The building was made in a striking style reminiscent of Frank Lloyd Wright and the swirling pattern had an almost magnetic power."The image resurfaced again when Tetsuo's younger brother Cozy reproduced it to decorate the door of his room.The pattern, together with a recurrent theme of streaming water as time in Ogata Korin's work, was the starting point for this piece. "This swirling image that has haunted me for years has finally been put to rest on a canvas."
The piece is door-size.A single door. A vortex portal.

THE MAKING

This piece originated as an art work for a magazine spread in 2000. The idea was to re-make it for a door-sized two-meter canvas. With the original data lost, even Cozy Suzuka's considerable CGI skills and state-of-the-art Maya graphics software failed to reproduce the effect.Tweaking the lens settings, still a crucial element was amiss.The secret sauce turned out to be in the rendering engine flaws of Lightwave software that was used to make the original image a decade earlier.After an exhaustive search and trip down a memory lane, a 10-year old copy of Lightwave produced the desired effect.

This is the second piece in the series.
The work on this painting took place shortly after completion of Clear Skies In May motion graphics project and was heavily influenced by the ukiyoe, or woodblock print, esthetic.

"I drew inspiration for this piece from the works of famous ukiyoe artist Utagawa Hiroshige, who depicted scenes from his extensive travels across Japan," says Suzuka. "And as I walk this country I feel … an unbearable itch in my nose."
"Allergies are the scourge of modern Japan and I myself lose the entire spring season to their debilitating symptoms. I can't think of anything more symbolic than a high-tech, mechanized pollen particle in a spray of nasal fluid."

This piece is a 3-D CG image of a mechanized flower executed in suibokuga style, traditional Japanese ink painting.The flower is of no particular family, but rather an abstracted mechanical representation of a plant. Japan is a country where no major religion holds sway, yet most people believe in the existence of god.Like the belief in the deity, Japanese shrines are often wedged between skyscrapers or perched precariously on rooftops, a resilient species of urban flora surviving in the inorganic jungle.

MOTIF

A polygon object is first assembled digitally from models of high-rise towers, TV antennae and electric wiring. A virtual camera is carefully placed, its viewing angle serving as the final image.The rendered picture is then processed in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator programs, finally making it on the silk screen for exposure. The canvas is covered in silver leaf, painted over white then scraped in places, allowing the metallic foil to shine through. The two-meter image is printed on top in a single pressing.Combining computer graphics with analogue screen printing and silver leaf techniques opens a world of creative possibilities. For example, animating an image in 29 frames and plucking one out for just the right moment in time.The vertical line in the center was originally conceived as a single bold brushstroke over the silkscreened image, but was eventually printed on because prices of a brush that caliber run into thousands of dollars, well exceeding Japanology's budgetary limits.

The shifting physical dimensions of a folding screen present an intriguing painting canvas and are the inspiration for this piece.Whether chopping the space with strong angles, bisecting it in a nearly straight line or hanging unobtrusively on a wall, a byobu possesses a wealth of physical talents, including the ability to fit in almost any elevator.Instead of creating a glorified partition wall, this piece aims to draw on buyobu's versatility by re-imagining it for a modern space.30X20 is an aerial visualization of Kyoto as a playing board for Go, Japanese chess. The city's angular concrete jungle is temper by the organic bloom of mountain ranges.

THE MAKING
First, golden leaf was procured from Hikone, Shiga prefecture, near Kyoto.To give the foil a more radiant sparkle than is normally found in byobu, several types of golden leaf are applied to the canvas in a pixel-dot fashion.With gold foil alone the painting still lacks a feeling depth of an aerial photo. In a risky move, ink is sprinkled over the foil, giving it a deeper texture.A matte finish is achieved by rubbing in gold powder. Despite the trial and error approach, the gold foil background is completed and ready for painting.The picture is applied by silkscreen. Typically a simple enough process, for this six-part two-meter byobu in three colors the production requires 18 screens and copious amounts of work.Barely finished, the piece already attracted attention and was requested for use in a film by Nakamura Shidou, a kabuki actor. A heartening vote of confidence.

The theme for TOU SHU KA SHUN is the interplay of an organic melody and an inorganic rhythm.Tokyo's urban jungle rarely betrays the march of seasons, but the changes are there, in colors seeping from the cracks and gaps of the city's concrete facade. Without indulging in pastoral nostalgia or simplistic dichotomy of man-versus-nature, the piece simply marvels at the strange magnetism of a blade of grass peaking through asphalt. It is from this contrast between the unchanging, unyielding and the one that endlessly transforms that the piece draws its imposing, artifact-like bearing. Like the seasons, the piece is divided into four parts, with layers sampling an inorganic architectural rhythm and a living melody of Japanese painting. The block-like motifs represent layers of musical notation scrolling vertically. Arranging the individual panels in various combinations produces unexpected melodies, but the order of winter-autumn-summer-spring seems to be the most harmonious. Just as with Mechabloom, it is a promising direction for further exploration.

THE MAKING

This piece is the culmination of much trial-and-error work with golden foil and therefore can be considered the most accomplished one in the series in that respect. A layer of gold paint over the foundation peeks from below the foil, its natural luster preserved successfully without additional coating. The golden leaf also has a vintage, aged look, helped by a matte finish on the adjacent paint. The advantages of silk screening are seeing in variation of colors for the tree element, giving it a feel of sampled piece of music.

Revolve is another play on the theme of organic vs. inorganic. Classified as furosaki byobu, a folding screen used to create a space in tea ceremony, this is Japanology's final work and the anchoring piece of the series. The work is intended as a microcosm of modern Japan, the dark portion representing heavy, overbearing logic of industrial and urban expansion. From the shadows cast by high-rise sprawl, a trembling branch of a plum tree and a nightingale reassert the eternal rhyme of nature.

THE MAKING
Instead of using gold foil, the background pattern is created with masking tape and spray paint. The cubical shapes against the golden background are asymmetrical, a randomized serrated edge of a modern cityscape. The block-like object is applied with rubber tools and spray, to give it a sense of heft. The atmosphere of this piece hinges on the imbalance between the heavy black object and delicateness of the bird and tree.