Lotus pond

Araki’s monumental, multi-panel paintings may beg comparisons with large-scale Japanese painting formats such as folding screens (byōbu) and sliding door panels (fusuma). However, his long, narrow compositions owe a great deal to another traditional painting format: the handscroll. A handscroll is held and manipulated by a single person who controls the unrolling of the scroll from right to left. The viewer determines the tempo of the unrolling in response to cues provided by the artist, such as shifting viewpoints, slowing down to investigate some scenes or perhaps speeding through others. Araki’s large-scale works offer a similarly dynamic viewing experience signaled by the composition but determined by the viewer.. Lotus Pond “opens” at far right with a view of distant peaks. A swath of unmarked paper then gives way to the dancing blossoms and flowers of a lotus pond in the foreground, which is then interrupted again by middleground and background views of trees, rocks, and distant mountains. Only in the seventh panel from the right do we take a deep dive, as it were, into the lotus pond itself, a riveting, close-up journey through a thick tangle of pink flowers, wide black leaves, and spindly stalks that finally gives way again in the farthest panel to the left to an expanse of blank paper.