Hiroka Yamashita
Landscape and Narrative

Hiroka Yamashita’s studio is located in an area of natural abundance with sweeping views of the Yoshii River, which flows north to south through Okayama Prefecture, and the gently rolling hills that stretch along its course. Most of her work is made here in a spacious studio, housed in a building so large that she spoke of her desire to one day host artist-in-residence programs there. Welcoming us warmly, she shared her thoughts on the environment that shaped her sensibilities and the feelings that arise while she works. We saw Yamashita engaging freely with her painting, while drawing on close connections to local culture nurtured by a long and rich history.

“In the Studio with Hiroka Yamashita”,  Jan 29, 2025 
Movie: Hyogo Mugyuda
Courtesy of Taka Ishii Gallery

A poet in the late 17th century departed to the Deep North in pursuit of his own Haiku.
It was a journey that he undertook to project his inscape on actual sceneries in his poems.

At each stop, he was fulfilled by beautiful sceneries, he adored the greenness of leaves that the sunlight made, and spent some time staring at the pattern of rocks and the surface of water.
One night, he even laughed at the smell of horse dung beside his bed.                     

They’re free.

These timeless landscapes of nature contain the history of countless lives that have come and gone, and the poet sent his heart to thousands of human dramas that belong to the land.
Nature loved all, and washed away their sins and absorbed their sorrows.
The wind sometimes sprung forth to rouse them.

He thought it’s beautiful.

He imagined that humans embody a sprit of nature.
He thought it’s beautiful.

He decided to sing as the grasses swing,
In praise of the beauty.

Hiroka Yamashita
2019 　

Landscape and Narrative

Yoshinori Ishikawa

“You’ve absolutely got to go this place, it’s amazing.”
One day, fifteen years after graduating from university, I found myself in Ebisu, Tokyo, at the invitation of my former lab professor. He said there was someone he wanted me to meet, and that someone turned out to be a professor who had joined the neighboring lab during my senior year. He was originally from Miyazaki Prefecture, and wanted to talk to me about a potential job there. “These ancient burial mounds are really something, you really need to see them at least once,” he said, speaking of the Mochida Kofun Cluster in Takanabe, a town of around 20,000 people about an hour’s drive north of Miyazaki Airport.

The site is on the left bank of the Omarugawa River, which flows eastward toward a north-south coastline. From an alluvial plain where rice paddies stretch almost to the sea, the land rises about 50 to 60 meters to a diluvial terrace. As you ascend, a wide vista of flatlands suddenly unfolds. Elevated plains like these are common in the region, and are known locally as baru. The sky is vast, and tea fields and cabbage patches spread out in all directions, lined with rows of frost-prevention fans standing like streetlights. White lightweight trucks are parked here and there, and farm machinery runs through the fields. Amid this scenery are grass-covered burial mounds (kofun) rising gently from the earth, dotting the landscape everywhere you look. I’d been told there were quite a few, but I was still taken aback by the actual number. Around 80 mounds have been identified within an area just one kilometer square. Many are about 20 to 30 meters long, but some rise only about 50 centimeters and look just like abandoned piles of compost. Still, I was impressed by how well they’ve been preserved. They are thought to be the tombs of powerful local figures, built 1,500 years ago or before, between the 4th and 6th centuries.

Some slightly larger ones are keyhole-shaped, while many in the fields appear rectangular at first glance. In fact, they were round when constructed, but farm equipment plowing the fields over the years has gradually worn them into more linear shapes. Whether or not that ought to have been permitted, the mounds are now part of the local landscape. The scent of livestock drifts on the wind. A neighboring town has a similar group of burial mounds, but there the entire baru has been preserved as a protected burial site. Here, however, active farmland and tombs of ancient leaders continue to coexist in the same landscape. I had never seen anything like this before.

The next day I returned to the Mochida Kofun Cluster, this time accompanied by a woman from the town office who was involved in archaeological surveys. She appeared to be around thirty. At first she seemed quiet and reserved, but once we started talking, she spoke freely and passionately about various aspects of the burial mounds. It was clear she was immensely dedicated to her work, and I learned an enormous amount from her. She told me, “When you try to convey the appeal of ancient times – especially compared to the early modern period, which people can more easily imagine – it’s important to help people sense the presence of the people who lived back then. Rather than just displaying pottery, stone tools, or the remains of dwellings, you need to bring history out of the textbook and into the real world, onto the ground beneath our feet. I believe the best means of doing that is to talk in a way that lets people envision those who made and used these things, and who lived in these places.”

As we came to one of the burial mounds I had walked past the day before, I happened to glance down and noticed a shard of pottery on the ground, which I was sure hadn’t been there yesterday. When I picked it up and handed it to her, she told me it was from the Yayoi period, about 2,000 years ago. “We had heavy rain yesterday evening, right? I think it must have washed down from the mound with the soil. When burial mounds were built, they dug around the perimeter and piled up the earth in the middle. In that process, older soil from the Yayoi period, which had been buried beneath the Kofun layer, ended up on top. And then, with a downpour like yesterday’s, we find something like this…” It felt as if I had picked up a key that enabled me to travel back and forth in time. As I handled the shard, I said, “You know, I think I actually prefer Yayoi pottery to Kofun pottery. Even though the Kofun period came later, Yayoi pottery feels more artfully made somehow. More refined.” “Ah,” she replied, “maybe it’s because people were too busy to bother much with pottery during the Kofun period. Busy building burial mounds, that is.”

There are times when landscape starts to seem like more than just something to look at. In Japanese, the etymological origins of the word for landscape, fukei, relate to nature spreading before the eyes amid wind and light. In English, the “scape” in landscape evokes flowing, transient space-time, implying constant flux. What we see before us is a fleeting moment in an ever-changing continuum, shaped by something far greater behind the scenes. We are somewhere within this expanse with no beginning and no end. Everything is connected to both past and future, just as any person’s life is preceded by their parents’ meeting, and just as any event has a before and after, premonitions beforehand and consequences afterward. The flow of nature and human activity continues within landscape, and at the same time, that very flow that shapes the landscape itself.

Those thoughts came back to me as I viewed Hiroka Yamashita’s paintings in her studio, some still in progress, others already complete. Probably it was because I sensed the presence of time in her landscapes. These works seemed to contain the passage of time, familiar places, grass that might now be shaggily overgrown, people I had never met, all overlapping and accumulating like layers of soil. They were like beautiful landscapes that had emerged from that soil, and at the same I felt as though I were walking through them, the earth spreading into the distance all around me.

For a moment, the light of sunset shone on the mountaintop, dazzlingly bright and brilliant red. Amagi recalled the red ocher of the pottery. The color spread across the sky, setting it aflame…
—Tomoji Abe, Asa no kagami (Morning Mirror), The Asahi Shimbun, 1954

This painting was inspired by the ancient Tsuki-no-wa burial mound, which was excavated in 1953 in the town of Misaki, Okayama Prefecture, and is estimated to date back to the early 5th century. On the morning of the day my solo exhibition was installed at Taka Ishii Gallery in December 2023, I came across a page from Morning Mirror, a novel by Tomoji Abe, who was from Mimasaka City, also in Okayama. I was amazed at how the passage resonated with the scenery of Tsuki-no-wa and my own experience there. I placed the novel in the gallery so visitors would be able to read that page. Even now, a deeply mysterious feeling comes over me.

I originally painted this in a horizontal format, but something felt off, so I turned it vertical.

Then, it started to remind me of a tree stump.

Come to think of it, I once found a large tree stump within the grounds of a shrine in Yufuin,

and had a conversation about whether it was okay to touch it or not. 

As I allowed these connections to take shape while painting, a woman emerged.

Then it struck me that this woman must be Unagi-hime (the Princess Eel),

since the shrine in Yufuin enshrines her. It feels like gradually drawing these threads together.

I feel like these elements appear of their own accord, the things I’ve seen, experiences I’ve had, myself and everything that has connected with me.

If I head north from my house, I reach Mount Nagi, along the border between Okayama and Tottori, in the mountainous backbone of the Chugoku range. This painting was inspired by my drive along the mountain pass there.

Descending the pass toward Tottori, an old post town called Chizu appears, and the scenery suddenly feels as though I’ve entered another country entirely. Just as the natural environment changes, so does the architectural style and arrangement of the houses. I sense a quiet, latent power that has been carefully protected in this place. For instance, when traveling and observing kagura performances, I’ve noticed certain programs are performed only in specific regions.

This makes me wonder, what have the people here cherished over countless years of living in this place? What I see now is the slowly cultivated essence of the land.

As I take in these differences, no matter where I am, I envision other times and places.

The Hiten-zu mural in the Golden Hall of Horyuji Temple, painted in the early 7th century, intertwines in my mind with the Noh stage performance of Hagoromo that I saw in a rapeseed field in Mimasaka, as well as with the color of the evening sky I saw on their way home after visiting their grandfather in the hospital for the last time. In that performance of Hagoromo, the sheer, airy costume swayed beautifully beneath the clear blue spring sky.

The landscape I encountered on my way home from school: A deer, gazing at me from afar.

The mountain stands right before me, but I never step into it. Mountains have a boundary of sorts.

So I would often imagine––what animals might emerge if all the trees on the mountain were cut down?

Once, playing at the shrine, I looked up to see a fox watching me from the cliff above.

I really love that sense of distance.

I’ve always been fascinated by the monsters and spirits in legends and folktales,

and by stories of mysterious phenomena, similar to these creatures,

that villagers in my hometown have actually experienced.

Somehow, these stories feel believable because the mountains surrounding my village form a boundless, unknown world.
It’s easy to imagine mysterious things dwelling within.

When the paint shows these two perspectives in one pictorial space, while the picture invites the viewers to a world created within the canvas, the physicality of paint constantly prompts us to break the illusion, pushing back.

Based on my experience, when we recognize the paint just as substance, our own physical presence emerges simultaneously.
It is like telling dreamers, brutally, that they cannot stay too long in the imaginary world.

I don’t know how, but sometimes, something surfaces in my life that doesn’t seem like mere coincidence. I may catch it in a fleeting moment, or slowly come to understand it over time. When I stand in a certain place, moving back and forth between the perspectives of people in ancient times and those far in the future, then survey the world from my own present perspective, I sometimes make discoveries I never expected. In those moments, I feel that the world is not something that a person can fully grasp in a single lifetime. There is something that transcends time and place, something that can always be shared in the present moment. I don’t paint solely from my own mind, I want something beyond myself to emerge in the work. Even after a painting is finished, it continues to shift and change through past, present, and future.

My favorite old tales from my grandmother:

When my grandmother was a young girl, an elderly hunter who mainly hunted raccoon dogs lived nearby. He hung many raccoon dogs he had shot outside his house. My grandmother found the sight very unsettling. Sometime later, the old hunter died, and when my grandmother attended his funeral, she saw that, for some reason, even in death his eyelids refused to close. His eyes, stretched unnervingly wide, looked like those of the dead raccoon dogs he’d hung outside his house.

And then, there’s the story of fox fire. When my grandmother was a child, she, her father, and an older girl from the neighborhood saw mysterious lights softly flickering on the mountain opposite them. Her father shouted “Hey!” in a scolding tone, and just like that, the light vanished.

Text / Interview: Yoshinori Ishikawa

Photos: Hyogo Mugyuda

Editor: Kyoko Nitta

Translation: Christopher Stephens

     Hiroka Yamashita was born and raised in a small village in the mountainous Harima region of western Hyogo Prefecture. She describes her hometown as “like one huge house, watched over by people who have lived there for centuries,” a place where nature and human civilization exist in harmony. After about a decade studying in the US, Yamashita came to recognize the deep connection she felt to her roots, an attachment that stood apart from what might be called global visual language. Upon returning to Japan, she deepened her exploration of spiritual essences that shape the natural and cultural environment, transcending the boundaries of the visible and invisible, and of the continuity between nature and humanity.

     Yamashita’s concept of “the transience of vision” in her work is situated along the long temporal axis of Japan’s landscape, shaped over time by both nature and human activity. Her paintings interweave everyday scenery with motifs from the creation myths of the Nihon Shoki (Chronicles of Japan) and the Kojiki (Records of Ancient Matters), regionally rooted traditional kagura dances performed at shrines across Japan, local customs, and folktales in which mononoke (supernatural beings) appear. She closely observes and incorporates not only myths that have taken on universal significance through written language, but also traditions that have emerged from the lives of ordinary people. These are stories without a singular author or speaker, which evolve and are passed down orally, always at risk of being forgotten. By bringing these elements into her paintings, she conjures ephemeral apparitions, landscapes that appear and disappear in an instant, alongside the aura of the unknowable. “What I paint is like a folktale woven from life, an intermediate world that is neither a direct record nor pure imagination,” Yamashita says, positioning herself as a medium, much like the oral tradition itself. In Japan, people have believed since ancient times that spirits and deities dwell in objects and the natural environment. Kunio Yanagita, a well-known folklorist from Yamashita’s hometown, explored the origins of this sense of awe for the Japanese, arguing that subconscious dread and awe led people to describe supernatural phenomena beyond human understanding as mononoke.

     Growing up in the Harima region undoubtedly shaped Yamashita’s sensibilities. However, her intellectual curiosity was also sparked by the ethnographic environment she was immersed in from her youth, being from the same hometown as Kunio Yanagita and encountering the philosophy of intellectual historian Tetsuro Watsuji from nearby Himeji. In addition, the poetry of Matsuo Basho, whose work she has admired for years, the spatial compositions of ukiyo-e, and her childhood practice of calligraphy have all played key roles in her artistic development. She notes that calligraphy requires a meditative state while moving the brush, where variations in speed and pressure, along with an embrace of chance and negative space, give rise to spontaneous forms. With free and fluid strokes, Yamashita gives life to colors and shapes on the canvas, imbuing collective narratives of the natural world, passed down since ancient times, with vivid form.

Hiroka Yamashita  “幽光  The Lights from the Deep Mountains“
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［Date］ May 9 – June 28, 2025
［Venue］ Kiang Malingue, Hong Kong
［URL］ https://kiangmalingue.com/

Yoshinori Ishikawa
Born in 1980 in Okayama prefecture
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After working in architecture, Ishikawa was involved in several projects at Benesse Art Site Naoshima, including Naoshima Bath “I♥︎湯”(I Love Yu), Lee Ufan Museum, and Teshima Art Museum. Since 2017 he has been a freelance curator, engaging with local cultures in various regions and writing Mountains and People, a series exploring the relationship between nature and humankind. He is currently involved with a remote mountain lodge located deep in Japan’s Northern Alps.