For 60 years, Portland Japanese Garden has promoted cultural diversity and peace through nature and art. The Garden’s exhibitions, featuring a rich variety of different media made by traditional and contemporary artists, explore ideas and aesthetics integral to the fabric of life in Japan. Following this theme, Portland Japanese Garden is delighted to be participating in “Social Forms: Art as Global Citizenship,” the upcoming iteration of a biennial program produced by local arts nonprofit Converge45. “Social Forms” is a Portland-wide exhibition that intersects regional, national and international perspectives around art and the futures it seeks. 

From August 24 through September 11, the Garden will show a video from Mexico City-born artist Bosco Sodi in its Jordan Schnitzer Japanese Arts Learning Center. Titled Baku (2012), this single-channel video documents the meticulous care of the gardener at the Konchi-In temple in Kyoto, Japan. Viewers will see the temple gardener perform his morning task of erasing the gravel garden, cleaning it, and remaking it. At once Sisyphean and meditative, the rhythm between the gardener and the garden becomes a hypnotic dance, engaging the viewer in a state of contemplation on the cyclical nature of life.

About Bosco Sodi

Bosco Sodi (b. 1970, Mexico City) is an internationally celebrated artist best known for his textured large-scale paintings and his sculptural installations composed of bricks, cubes, and spheres formed from the clay near his studio in Oaxaca. Sodi’s practice has long been influenced by wabi-sabi, the Japanese aesthetic that embraces imperfections and transience, simplicity and austerity, and the effects of forces of nature on natural objects.