Wave Garden 2024
2024
Hydrosocial aesthetics in Eiji Sumi’s ‘Wave Garden / El Paradiso
Within the walls of an urban gallery space, the artistic positions of Eiji Sumi’s solo exhibition ‘Wave Garden / El Paradiso’ symbolically recreate a garden within which water becomes the central element. Inspired by the century old knowledge and rich symbolisms of Zen Rock Gardens, Japanese artist Sumi traces “the voyage from life to death, traversing the river of existence towards the infinite expanse of the universe, where the promise of paradise awaits.” 1
As we walk along the eleven meter wave tank centered within the gallery-turned-garden space, I want to take you onto a journey into the interconnectedness of water x society – a hydrosocial 2 journey. Engaging a thinking-with the positions within this exhibition, I interpret the relationalities within and between the three positions in Eiji Sumi’s solo exhibition ‘Wave Garden / El Paradiso’ as ‘hydrosocial aesthetics.’ Thereby, the artworks not only capture relations between what seems natural vs. human or artificial, but they importantly imagine reinterpreted hydrosocial relations within contemporary Asia.
‘Wave Garden’ is inspired inter alia through the famous Daisen-in garden’s recreation of the voyage of a river from the mountain spring meandering all the way to the ocean that Sumi symbolically interprets as our journey from birth to death, a journey of widening our experiences and knowledges. 3 As we follow a wave rippling along the tank we are reminded of the inherently political character of water. A hydrosocial understanding reminds us, it is not merely a chemical compound H2O flowing downstream that we are dealing with, but concurrently a complex network of human-more-than-human relations that are shifting with every decision made. I see this complexity represented within the aesthetic shifts in the wave tank brought about by the possibility to manipulate wave heights to create different waves, sounds, spheres, imaginaries.
In the backdrop a soundscape emerges interrupting our focus ever so slightly. ‘Suikinkutsu’ – a network of ceramic water bells – fuses what seems ‘artificial’ with that which is often understood as ‘natural’. Hollow Ceramic enhanced sounds of dripping of water create a water-soundscape with hydrotherapeutic potential. The glitch – allowing the ‘artificial’ mediation of the ‘natural’ – emphasizes how water can be simultaneously a “gateway to the realms of imagination” 1 and become manipulated by our imagination.
Finally, with the sound steadily persisting, our gaze wanders on: The landscape in ‘El paradiso’ painted with ink on Washi paper and totaling a length of four meters, initially emits calmness and hints towards the promise of paradise this garden seeks to provide. Yet again, we come across glitches and start to see the network of nodes that unfold behind this tranquility. A journey across four Asian localities, from Japan via China and Thailand to India, like a river when flowing through beautiful, rich waterscapes, 4 simultaneously and uncontradictably reveals natural disasters as earthquakes and tsunamis; shifting political climates with tightening freedom of speech; and pollution of our surroundings, both socio-politically and environmentally. Seeing nature x society as interconnected, we start to acknowledge these relations as complex networks where rivers encapsulate both borders and connectivity:
Rivers are fluid. Rivers connect. Rivers separate.
All of this is true at one and the same time showing how water x society are not just mechanically linked but are always already interconnected. In ‘Wave Garden / El Paradiso,’ Sumi intends to “create a space that fosters mindfulness” while simultaneously highlighting the “the multifaceted fears and dilemmas prevalent in various Asian countries” 1 – just as the grounding philosophy of Zen Rock Gardens indicates, a hydrosocial aesthetic allows us to understand that these are not mutually exclusive spheres but the very core of our contemporary realities.
written by Johanna M. Götz, July 2024
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