About this Event
Please join us at the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco at 1:30 pm on May 19th for a private presentation of Ripples of Physis, a new documentary film produced by renowned Japanese designer and artist Sanae Kawai. After the showing, responses will be offered by Jungian analysts Linda Carter, Chair and Founder of the International Art and Psyche Working Group, and John Beebe, Chair of the Institute’s Development Committee.
About the film:
Kyo Karakami Karacho (or simply, Karacho), a long-established maker of handprinted karakami (decorative paper), is the only company of its kind to have remained continuously active in Japan for 400 years. The company’s karakami has been used to decorate a wide range of spaces with hundreds of combinations of ground colors and patterns assembled freshly to express the atmosphere of a given age. Even today, the paper can be found on display within Japan’s “Important Cultural Properties” such as Katsura Imperial Villa, Nijo-jo Castle, sacred temples and shrines, and contemporary chanoyu tearooms and machiya townhouses.
Born of a dialogue between the memory of nature and the human hand, karakami is made by printing motifs on the paper in reverse. In the gap between the printing block and the paper what emerges is an unbroken cycle of movement between inside and outside, past and future.
Of the more than 600 patterns that have been successfully conveyed by the Karacho company, many center on motifs that are closely linked to Japanese views of nature and religion. These auspicious designs are created with printing blocks that are themselves imbued with the spirit of the forest, mineral pigments containing crushed memories of rocks from thousands of years ago, and washi paper bleached by the water and sun The irregularities that arise in the manual reproduction process create beautiful fluctuations in the overall work. Karakami captures and preserves a sense of eternity.
What is happening to a person when thoughts in the mind are converted into visual images? The ambiguous rich world of archetypal patterns is composed of diversity and fluctuation, which pose the question of why humans create. In my own view, such patterns go back to the origins of artmaking to construct an entrance to archaic layers of existence in which nostalgic memories shared by all humankind are preserved. This act of expressing something almost invisible that is in danger of being lost to eternity if it is not immediately captured makes palpable in form something that might initially seem to be fraught with contradictions. It is my hope that this film, an exploration of this profound world of patterns, will serve people today as a reintroduction to a still-vigorous Japanese medium that carries new hope and wisdom for all of us.
- Sanae Kawai, producer
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
C.G. Jung Institute, 2610 Mission Street, San Francisco, United States
USD 0.00
