View, Kyoto “On Japanese Gardens and Temples”

Hassink (*1966 in Enschede) commenced working on a multipart, enticingly beautiful series in which she examines how the interior and exterior spaces of individual structures permeate or face one another. She took photographs of the surrounding traditional Japanese gardens from within the buildings, placing equal weight on both areas. In two of the temples she was allowed to move sliding rice-paper screens for the purpose of creating new, enormous spatial entities. The moss gardens of Saiho-ji and the cherry blossoms in Haradani-in constitute a further focus of the series. These scenes, which change with the seasons—Hassink calls them “living sculptures”—reflect Japanese aesthetics, which see both an artificial likeness of nature as well as representations of paradise in arranged gardens.