Regardless of one's own relationship to religion, many of us are disposed to believe we can transcend the present world, rising above it to another super-reality, to a surreal world.
A striking visual corollary to that idea is made by painter Hiroshi Asada's "Landscape of Fallen Soil" (1970) in the "Hiroshi Asada Retrospective" at the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, till Sept. 17. In the work there is a multiplication of horizons, piled into a few layers that are somehow incongruously continuous with each other.
One landscape at the top is upside down and seems to nourish the landscape below, feeding it clods of dirt. Composite forms, inscrutable and half-realized, congeal in the surrounding terrains. This is a land of illusion, but one still close to nature.