Yoshitaka Nanjo creates landscape paintings using actual soil based on his field-work. He has been working on many subjects based on Japanese people’s religious views, manners and landscape views that came from their travels or journeys such as ‘Isemoude’(travel culture of Shinto and Edo period), ‘Edo five routes’, ‘Mt.Fuji worship’, ‘Tokyo Bay’(‘Edo-mae’ in front of Edo bay=Tokyo bay culture), ‘Kumano Kodo’(animism) and ‘Mountain Worship’. He actually goes to the subject places, walks with his own legs and observes the scenery of towns and mountains to create artworks. He dissolves images in the pictures he took using a computer until the scenery becomes objects and sieves earth and soil until they get as small as pigment. He then changes over to an analog process with a paint brush and transcribes the scenery on a viewing surface according to the digital outputs of images. “Layering soil acrylic, digital work and analog work creates conflicting spaces in the painting. In doing so, a landscape will be produced that amounts to more than the original landscape – or a landscape completely different to the original will appear in the painting. At that moment, the background colored in white many times will be changed into void space with boundless colors.” His works are visually very simple. He also tries not to fill the paintings completely with information and force viewers to see the work as a narrative, but instead tries to produce landscape paintings as if they can arouse viewers’ aesthetic sensibilities with very little information, almost as if his image is just about to reach viewers. Although his works are dealing with ‘landscape’ which is the most classic, and can be a boring subject, the landscapes he creates are very modernistic and stylish, and they are receiving overwhelming reputations from various kinds of creators.

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