Kenrokuen’s ‘Six Attributes’ are not six individual sights, but six qualities sought in an ideal landscape garden: spaciousness, seclusion, artifice, antiquity, water-courses, and panoramas. They form three apparently opposing pairs—spaciousness and seclusion, artifice and antiquity, water-courses and panoramas. Excessive openness rarely produces a sense of hidden depth; the more visible human intervention becomes, the harder it is to preserve natural antiquity; and a landscape rich in ponds and waterfalls does not easily offer a far-reaching view at the same time. Kenrokuen takes its name from allowing these opposing extremes to coexist. That is what draws me so strongly to it.
To me, the Six Attributes are more than knowledge about gardens. They come closer to a human instinct for beauty: six directions through which we look at and feel the world. I therefore used them to name the six chapters of my work, and as a measure by which I repeatedly examine both myself and what I make.
‘Spaciousness’ is not only a matter of scale. Even a small work can feel expansive when it allows the viewer’s gaze to continue beyond the frame, suggesting that a larger world still exists outside it, with room for air and silence. In Grand Miniatures, I try to conceal that vastness inside a limited image.
‘Seclusion’ does not simply mean darkness. It is the depth left unspoken behind what can be seen—the state I seek, in which something remains indistinct yet undeniably present. Enigmatic Girl was originally titled Flowing Girls. Its afterimages and layered lines embody, for me, a beauty that does not hurry to reveal itself.
‘Artifice’ is the will and memory left by human beings. The ballpoint line itself is one form of it: repeated hatching is built jointly by the hand and time; a handmade frame retains traces its maker cannot completely erase; and a commission asks me to understand another person’s feeling anew before translating it into an image. Human-Made Commissions values a warmth that cannot be replaced by any other means—the warmth of the hand.
‘Antiquity’ is not a deliberate imitation of age, but a surface genuinely acted upon by time: rust, fading, wear, and incompleteness. Someone once asked me on Threads how I regard the fading of ballpoint ink. I would rather accept the ink as it naturally grows paler and yellower with time. Things lose their brilliance, yet become more truthful. Metal resists time even as time slowly rusts it; ink also fades year by year, like certain old paintings whose warm, yellow-brown cast now carries an irreplaceable sense of age. This is what antiquity means to me.
‘Water-courses’ signify more than water held in a pond or moving through a stream. They suggest flow, growth, and return. The pull of a line, translucent layers of color, the direction that guides a viewer’s eye, and summer light lingering on water all belong to my understanding of this quality. In intense summer heat, the outlines of things waver before us; that image appears still, yet remains in motion, and to me it too is a kind of water-course. Summer at the Spring therefore preserves the memory of a season still flowing.
‘Panoramas’ are both distant views and the act of stepping back. With distance, one no longer sees only a single form, but the relationships among figures, space, and one another. In Gazing Twins, two presences share the same horizon while retaining an irreducible distance of their own.
What matters most to me is not that each of the six qualities stands alone, but that contradictions need not erase one another. A miniature may be spacious; human craft may become ancient; seclusion may still contain a distant view. If a work can hold these opposing forces in a quiet, centred balance, that is the Six Attributes I pursue—and the measure by which I judge my own work.