On the first-floor Space2 gallery of the WHAT Museum (Warehouse Art Terrada Museum), Masayoshi Nojo’s large-scale, argent depictions of verdant woodland shimmer in the daylight. When viewed from different angles, the artworks’ varying densities of silver seem to shift and glint, enhancing detailed silhouettes of dense foliage like huge, exquisite daguerreotypes.
“The images are from photographs that I edited on a computer before silk-screen printing them onto canvas,” says Nojo when a visitor asks about his artistic process. “I originally trained as a nihonga (traditional Japanese art) artist, but I did my masters in contemporary art, so the densities of color are formed by overlapping layers of silver leaf — a traditional Japanese technique — and aluminum.”
Nojo’s “Immerse yourself in the transitory nature” exhibition is the first iteration of “Open Creation of Art,” a series of showcases that invites visitors to meet contemporary artists and observe them at work. The Space2 gallery is just one of two floors of exhibition spaces that comprise the WHAT Museum, Warehouse Terrada’s newest art venue of Tennoz Isle, a 200,000-square-meter island in Tokyo Bay that over the past decade has been transformed into a thriving art hub.