Yoko Asakai produces elegant compressions of time, movement and the invisible forces that structure the visible fields of her photographic imagery, while embracing a critical appreciation of the conventions of representing landscape. Frequently produced in series, the effects of her images are cumulative, and their serial nature is often necessary to their interpretation. Her projects, like those of peers Motoyuki Shitamichi and Takashi Arai, attest to the ongoing influence of the critical landscape practices of photographers like Naoya Hatakeyama, Takuma Nakahira, Toshio Shibata and Tomoko Yoneda at a time when environmental crises have lent such work a renewed sense of urgency.

The ‘Passage’ series 2011 is a set of eight photographic works depicting rural and outer urban landscapes, shot along empty roads. The pronounced use of vanishing-point perspective is a hallmark of the series, as is the attention paid to the relationship between sky and land. Of particular note are the unusual LED road signs — attached to instruments called aerovanes — which are the focal point of the images. Aerovanes measure the speed and direction of the wind, their presence indicating a place where residents must learn to live with the forces of nature. Each work is titled according to the readings of the signs — Southwest wind 1m, South wind 0m, and so on — with one image representing each of the major compass points.

Asakai took these images during a residency in Aomori Prefecture in the far north of Honshu, Japan’s main island; Aomori is a region subject to blustery monsoons and crop-threatening winter chills. For each photograph, the artist researched wind patterns, then drove across the prefecture attempting to locate and photograph signs depicting each wind direction. The eeriness of the empty roadscapes is underpinned by the ominous sense of silent apocalypse that gripped Japan in the months after the Fukushima nuclear disaster in March 2011 — a radioactive cloud travelled north-west across the country with Aomori in its path. At the time these images were taken, wind direction had taken on a menacing significance.

Other recent series by the artist have involved tracking tidal movements and other meteorological phenomena in such far-flung parts of Japan as north-west Hokkaido and the Yaeyama Islands at the southern extreme of Okinawa Prefecture. Asakai’s turn to landscape, however, is relatively recent, prompted by interviews with scientists conducted as part of her earlier ethnographic research. She became fascinated with what she describes as ‘the external and internal clocks of organisms that are in harmony with the regularity of nature’, prompting a second look at contemporary society with its accelerating 24-hour cycles, and the unusual temporal structure of photography itself. ‘It is not that the photograph has no time because it cannot capture movement,’ she comments, ‘but rather that it has nothing but time’.¹

Yoko Asakai’s practice is one of formidable labour and patience, of time taken to wait for a major tide or to locate the electronic report of a given wind direction. Her photographs are the outcome of this expenditure of time and the register of time’s passage, the moment a given wind passes through a landscape or the rhythmic oscillation of the seas.

Endnote

1. Yoko Asakai, artist interview, in Out of Doubt: Roppongi Crossing 2013 [exhibition catalogue], Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2013, p.181.

Feature image: South wind 0m (from ‘Passage’ series) 2011 / Chromogenic print, ed. 1/5 / 43.5 x 56cm / The Kenneth and Yasuko Myer Collection of Contemporary Asian Art. Purchased 2014 with funds from Michael Sidney Myer through the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation / © Yoko Asakai