“I had a dream. I think it was probably six or seven years ago. I remembered the dream clearly because the internal scene was so powerful, so beautiful, it was almost scary. About six months later, as I was drinking my coffee on a Sunday morning, idly watching TV with my head still half-asleep, I was surprised to suddenly see the image from that dream reappear. It was a scene of many people and horses together in a green meadow before a large mountain—a place called Aso.”
In Ametsuchi, Rinko Kawauchi presents the field burning at Aso and the cyclical nature of life as a central motif. Along with this ritual, which has been passed down from generation to generation for thousands of years, Kawauchi also includes images of three other subjects, which emphasize ancient ideas of time, motion, interconnectedness, and the confluence of heaven and earth: the Shiromi Kagura festival (a theatrical Shinto dance ceremony in the Miyazaki Prefecture), scenes of people praying at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, and abstract drawings made with a laser pointer on a starry planetarium ceiling.
