Title: Mono No Aware
Year: 2015
Length: 02:39
Format: Digital video
Mono no aware – is one of Japanese aesthetic value, an awareness of the impermanence and transience of life and the gentle sadness and wistfulness that comes with this knowledge – literally translates to “the pathos of things”. Mono no aware is universal that can be experienced by anyone though accepting life as it is relates to the core of the Zen practice. It teaches the mankind is not the centre of the world but in observing nature we see the life and death cycle and the mortality of being: everything with a beginning has an ending. This aesthetic put the emphasis on the ephemerality of mankind and insists that the we observes time and being. The present moment is the product of what has been done in the past. This work was made during the 3-months artist residency and exhibited at 30 Upstairs Art Space in Wellington in 2015 along with the series of paintings.
Thematic tags: Landscape, politics, environment/ecology, decoloniality, history, spirituality
Yukari Kaihori is a visual artist currently based in Tāmaki Makaurau. Kaihori is primarily a painter whose works change from project to project but a theme she often investigates is the “in- between-ness” of cultural and social values, the physicality of artworks, the Western and the Eastern, organic and mechanic, permanent and temporary, and nature and men. She has exhibited her work in both public and private spaces including we painted the wall with cracks (2020) play_station, This Land is All We Know (2019) Hastings City Art Gallery, Infinite Planes ( 2019) Parlour Project and Blue Fancy ( 2019) Milford Galleries. She was the recipient of Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant award in 2015 (NY), and was a Fellow at the Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus in Germany.