l u n k i e

This year I really wanted to work about the celebration of spring and its ephemeral beauty.
After being in Rajasthan for Hôli festival, I was ready for Hanami in Kyôto.
I've wanted to explore as much as I could the world of geisha. I'm fascinated by this women who gives their life to master in their art (music, dance, tea ceremony, ikebana, conversation and so much more) celebrating each season every year.
They are the flowers of Kyoto's Hanamachis (litteraly flower-district), and their beauty, as much as the world of geiko, is changing year after year.
I've been thinking of how I could work about this subject. It appeared to me that I should explore more my project of making posters with rice paper as I did 2 years ago.
In the Edo time, life in Kyoto's hanamachi was very different than it is now: so many geikos and maikos (apprentices) performing in theaters, and many painters picturing this time through what we call know ukiyo-e: popular paintings representing scenes of the daily life, beautiful women in flaming kimonos...
I wanted to mix my street spirit with this magnificent and mysterious world of geikos.
So I decided to make posters on a very fragile paper (rice paper), working with watercolours, charcoals, and inks... mixing ukiyo-e and street style, representing geikos and maikos in imaginary scenes. One poster per hanamachi.
In the meantime, I got used to hang out a lot in the streets of Gion, Ponto-chô and Miyagawachô: the 3 main districts where geishas of Kyoto live and perform.
I had the chance to meet some of them, see them performing and taking pictures of them.
I wanted my series of paintings/posters to be a dedication to their beauty, life and history, delicacy fragility and strongness, poetry... and even though I knew pasting posters is now completely forbidden in their district, I was hoping to see those paintings get old with the seasons passing, just as their subject.
Unfortunately, in Japan "rules are rules", so my paintings got removed by the cops just a few days after it was pasted (it hasn't been torned thought).
Sad to see the world of geisha and Kyoto's ancient craft slowly dying and closed to modernity and free art, but my paintings had to be ephemeral and I had the chance to see and hear a lot of geikos looking at it and saying "kirei !" ("it's beautiful !")...I guess this interaction between my subjects and my paintings are the best compliments I could ever get !