Visual Zen: Rediscovering Creativity Amidst Japanese Landscapes
In the quiet dance between familiarity and foreignness, I found myself wandering through the streets of Japan with a camera in hand, capturing moments that echoed the distant landscapes of my New Zealand home. As I navigated the vibrant tapestry of Japan, the juxtaposition of cultures, the whispering trees, and the gentle flow of water brought forth an elusive feeling—an intangible bridge between two worlds. Japan, with its ancient traditions and modern nuances, felt like a dream where the echoes of home met the novelty of the unknown.
Living all my life at the bottom of the world in New Zealand, we as a nation are isolated from the world by vast oceans and distances. This makes traveling abroad a privilege, and it's also very normal for New Zealanders to do when we are young. We call it an OE (Overseas Experience), usually done the year before going to university to find out who you are or what you want to do with your life. By seeing the world and other people's ways of living, or in truth just to get drunk and try to have sex with people in exotic places.
Myself, I never had an OE. I already thought I knew what I wanted to do with my life: create. I rationalized that the best way to make a living creating was as a graphic designer. I was right, but this career choice was so wrong for me. After being a graphic designer for 3 years, I quit. During this time, I picked up a camera and gave myself 2 years to make a living off this device. I did it in one. While this was happening, I wanted to find my voice; this took much longer to find than one year or having an OE. This took until I was in my early 30s. Just over a decade to find who I was and how I see the world.
Like most of us, life happened, and I found love and got married. It's a tradition here to go on a honeymoon overseas. But COVID hit right before our wedding, and a nationwide lockdown was in effect between our wedding. One day you were not allowed out of your house, the next you were, so we got married. Then all of a sudden, a nationwide lockdown once again. So our overseas honeymoon was on hold. It wasn't until two years later that we finally got to go to the country we wanted to visit, Japan.
This Japan project was from our time in Japan over a span of a month, traveling the country from Tokyo down to Osaka, while visiting Nara, Suzuka, and Kyoto in between. These images capture the familiarity of a foreigner in a place that, at the same time, felt like home and yet distinctly different. A sense of being between two worlds, something I was familiar with in a location I didn't consider home.
When walking through the beautiful country, I would sometimes forget I was halfway across the world, as Japan and New Zealand are both islands in the Pacific Ocean, with old cultures and traditions but could never be mistaken for each other. Yet the land, the trees, the water, and nature feel so alike; it was like walking in a dream state. I was there, yet it felt like home. A very real but elusive state of being.
I was considering not bringing my camera, as, for a time, I had put it down and had not picked it up since. It was during this time that I rekindled my love for the art of seeing what the world looks like as a photograph. My eye was never still, never bored. I noticed the unnoticed, the mundane, and the beauty in the ordinary. Thanks to my wife forcing me to take my camera, and thanks to the beauty of Japan and the Zen ideals for bringing me back to my creative self, I am one again. The joy of being content, watching the world pass us by.
