Sansui Tokyo is a collective that considers contemporary art and society under the theme of sansui thought to be peculiar to East Asia. Sansui is often regarded as a classical subject represented by landscape painting (sansuiga/shanshuihua) and rock gardens (karesansui), but an underlying human non-agency presents us with many implications in the 21st century.
Ryosuke Kondo, who presides over Sansui Tokyo, has long been interested in an understanding of nature rooted in East Asia and found in fieldwork in both Chinese feng shui and Japanese gardens while researching the history of the Western landscape. The term “landscape,” derived from the West, is premised on the binary opposition between humans (the subject) and nature (the object), whereas sansui, in East Asia, presupposes that both humans and nature exist undifferentiated in the flux of all things.
A perspective such as that of sansui, which does not fit within a limited framework of nature and landscape, can be effective when facing a present-day society in which modern Western values are reaching a deadlock. Sansui Tokyo explores the world of sansui in a unique way and aims to build a new relationship between art and society.
