VIEW, KYOTO

Benrubi Gallery is proud to present Jacqueline Hassink’s View, Kyoto, a remarkable

series of photographs of Kyoto’s Zen Buddhist temples and gardens. Japan’s capital from

794 to 1868, Kyoto is home to some 1,600 temples, each with its own garden. Over the

course of a decade (2004 – 2014) Hassink photographed 34 locations throughout the

seasons. This is Hassink’s first solo exhibition with Benrubi and is supported as a part of the

Dutch Culture USA program by the Consulate General of the Netherlands in New York. Her

ninth monograph, View, Kyoto, published by Hatje Cantz, comes out March 24, 2015.
 

Hassink’s images are suffused with the unique appeal of Japanese architecture and

landscape even as they create their own aesthetics. Temple design is scaled to the 1:2 ratio

of the tatami, itself ordered to the size of a human body. Hassink’s lens brings out this

human point of view, her camera positioned as if the viewer were now standing, now seated

on a mat; poised at a threshold or located on the veranda between temple and garden. The

composition of the photographs is as carefully considered as the sacred spaces they reveal,

highlighting the balanced yet never static interplay between interior and exterior spaces in

temple design. The rigidity of the temple’s lines and angles is played off against the softer

garden forms seen through open doors or unglazed window. The browns and golds and

whites of the interiors, with here and there a spot or stripe of bold red, collage with the

brown, grays, and greens of the gardens to create a single meshed field. If, initially, the

perception is one of division between human and nature or terrestrial and divine, it soon

becomes one of continuity between two realms. Neither is wholly constructed or found;

neither could exist without the other.
 

On view in the project space is a film diptych in which interviews with the head monks of four

sects are paired with a journey through the temples themselves. The film gives voice to the

men responsible for these remarkable spaces while simultaneously capturing the

experience of transitioning between public and private, secular and sacred.
 

Hassink’s work has been widely collected and exhibited, including shows at Huis Marseille in

Amsterdam; Fotomuseum Winterthur, Winterthur; Amador Gallery and ICP in New York;

Tokyo Metropolitan Museum for Photography, Tokyo; The Photographers’ Gallery and the

Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Guangzhou Museum of Modern Art,

Guangzhou. It has also appeared in such publications as The Financial Times, Le Monde,The

New York Times, El Pais, Frankfurter Allgemeine, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Reuters, De

Standaard, NZZ,Newsweek, Fortune, and Wired.