While being commissioned to make the stage curtain for the Bunkakaikan Shogin TACT Tsuruoka in Tsuruoka City, Yamagata Prefecture, Hiroshi Senju was deeply impressed with Yamagata Dantsu’s facilities and craftspersonship. Thus leading to their latest collaboration.
Hiroshi Senju’s genius comes from his works’ ability to express their natural beauty on their own. This time he utilized a waterfall for his latest masterpiece“SUIJIN”.
Hiroshi SenjuJapanese Artist
1958, Born in Tokyo. 1987, graduated Tokyo University of the Arts Graduate School.
1995, Was the first Asian to receive an Honorable Mention at the 46th Venice Biennale in Italy.
2017, Opened an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Recipient of the Isamu Noguchi Award.
2018, Opened the Hiroshi Senju Exhibition: ‘Commemorating the Completion of Fusuma Paintings for Kongobuji Temple, Mt. Kyosan’. His activities began to attract a wide array of attention internationally.
His works are showcased at many art museums in Japan and the United States. He was the president of Kyoto University of Art & Design from 2007 to 2013, presently he is a professor of Kyoto University of Art & Design.
An interview about the story behind the designs, introduction to Yamagata Dantsu, and future plans.
My close friend Kazuyo Sejima, a world-famous architect, was designing the Bunkakaikan Shogin TACT Tsuruoka and asked me to design the stage curtain for the venue hall. It was a great honor for me. This stage curtain would be seen by people all over the world, so I really felt like I had to design something exceptional and was quite nervous about it. Needless to say, I had several different companies send me some samples, so I could compare them. Yamagata Dantsu’s was, without a doubt, the best one. Not just by visual inspection, but the tactile feel of the samples was simply amazing. It was a quick and easy decision to choose Yamagata Dantsu. Yamagata Dantsu makes superb products and it’s such an honor to work with them to design this curtain.
While making the stage curtain, I couldn’t stop thinking about ‘How wonderful this would be to walk on’. So I decided to design “SUIJIN” in the hopes that you, too, can have that sensation I felt while walking barefoot on the carpet at home. I thought that the gradation would be exceedingly difficult. There is a subtle gradation of white that I wasn’t sure could be done properly. But that wasn’t the case at all, there were delicate creams blending into grays melting into purples that was not present in the original image design. I was truly impressed with their professional mastery of their craft. I think “SUIJIN” appeals to everyone from newborns to the elderly alike.
If you think ‘In the future, I’d like to do this’ but now let’s do this, I don’t think that is a good way to go about things. I think doing what you want to do in the future, now is “Living”. To me, now is the future. I’m constantly trying to do what I want to do when I want to do it. This carpet isn’t one of my old designs, it is the hot new thing to me, it is “SUIJIN”. While doing this collaboration with Yamagata Dantsu, one thing I realized, is that most important thing about doing a collaboration with someone, is that you should only do one with someone you respect. I think that is one of the reasons why this carpet is as successful as it is.
