Gunjo: Celestial Butterflies
Galerie Keshavarzian
23 Rue de Miromesnil
75008 Paris, France
April 3, 2025 - April 23, 2025
Gunjo: Celestial Butterflies is a tribute to my father, mother, and brother. Set against a field of Japanese gunjo blue—a vast, deep sky of a color—the body of work alludes to a space outside of time, where memory and spirit move freely. The works, with their motifs of shapeshifting and alchemy, are memorials to my lost family members and their enduring presence.
At the center of the exhibition are three hologram works, each featuring a celestial circle as a surrogate for a loved one:
A golden circle with red butterflies for my father, symbolizing his strength, his passion, and the warmth he carried.
A silver circle with blue butterflies for my mother, reflecting her wisdom, her grace, and her nurturing presence.
A copper circle with yellow butterflies for my brother, embodying his joy, his metamorphosis, and his light.
Encircling these orbs, the deep blue obtained from azurite particles, carries both spiritual and historical significance in Japan, where my family is originally from. Used for centuries in Buddhist art, temple ceilings, paintings and folding screens, gunjo is a color of depth, mystery, and the sacred. It was a perfect medium for exploring themes of memory and loss, evoking a space where absence and presence coexist.
Throughout the gallery, the butterfly serves as a recurring symbol of transformation. Its life cycle—caterpillar, chrysalis, winged being—mirrors the way we move through life, and beyond it. The butterflies, in their shedding of former self, suggest that nothing is really lost. Energy shifts, presence echoes on.
As a whole, Gunjo: Celestial Butterflies reflects the cyclical nature of existence. It explores how love extends beyond loss, and how transformation is inevitable but never final. It’s a meditation on memory, transition, and the idea that there are many ways to translate those we love into being. They move with the wind, they glow in the abyss. They are here.
Materials and Methods
Written by Filmmaker Linda Hoaglund
The physical materials used in Gunjo: Celestial Butterflies were created by nature and the labor intensive and handcraftedmethods are steeped in Japanese artistic traditions. Terasaki has deliberately complemented that minimalist aesthetic with the maximalist technology of Augmented Reality to envision a contemporary, interactive experience.
Background
Terasaki became fascinated with Japanese art as a child. Growing up in Los Angeles, he remembers watching his grandfather, a first generation Japanese American trained in Japanese art, surrounded by the folding screens and hanging scrolls that he specialized in restoring. The artworks, all crafted with organic materials and vulnerable to the ravages of time and exposure to the elements, were given new life by his grandfather’spainstaking treatments. His uncle had moved to New York to become an artist, and he remembers feeling innately drawn toJapan’s art and traditional cultures, an inclination enhanced by the fortuitous decision his parents to name him with the Japanese name, Taiji.
For centuries, Japanese artists turned to nature to obtain their color palette, painting with iwa-enogu, pigments created by pulverizing minerals such as azurite, malachite, and cinnabar,binding them with an organic adherent. Unlike oil paints, iwa-enogu colors cannot be mixed to create new colors because eachmineral fragments into particles of varying sizes and weights,precluding smooth blends. Instead, minerals are granulatedinto a range of specific particle sizes that each yield their own distinct hues.
群青Gunjo, which means a multitude of blues, is created by grinding azurite, a mineral found in copper ore deposits, whose particles are saturated with the violet-tinged shades of a deep blue sky. Like other iwa-enogu, gunjo can be ground into fine powders that produce lighter hues and coarser grains that yield darker shades. Today, the particle sizes are numbered, risingfrom coarse to increasingly fine. Like other mineral pigments, the coarser grains of hand-ground gunjo are speckled withlight, diffusely reflected by the craggy facets of the particles.
Regardless of particle size, single painted layers of iwa-enoguare pale and demand the patience for multiple applications to achieve any desired hue. This repeated layering can result in pigment grains coalescing into unanticipated patterns, and the intricate overlays of particles can conjure unexpected depths of color, astonishing the artist as much as viewers.
Gunjo’s inherent radiance, undiluted with additives, and the infinitesimally diverse particles reflecting ambient light like sunlight playing off the ocean, result in vistas that subtly shiftwith the viewer’s position. An expanse of gunjo, suffused with elegant depth and intense luminosity, is beyond compare.
Japanese artists have long been captivated by gunjo, but the natural pigment remains an extravagance because its sources and supplies are limited. They have used it since at least the 7thcentury, initially in Buddhist hanging scrolls, then on artworks painted on the sliding doors of medieval castles and ceiling paintings in Buddhist temples. Later artists used gunjo to enliven irises and mornings glories on the gold leaf backgrounds of large-scale folding screens. Early 20th century artists used the mineral pigments they had been trained with to experiment with the influences of Western art. Gunjo’s association with the infinite depths of the skies and the seas have also long appealed to writers, who still use the word metaphorically in their works.
The Gunjo Paintings
The Gunjo paintings began by pasting large, pre-sized washi paper onto three wood panels. The washi was treated with a primer made of gofun, crushed dry-aged oyster shells bound with nikawa, a gel adherent produced by melting powdered cowhide and fish skin with hot water.Following the primer, two base layers of gunjo suihi, #7 semi-coarse gunjo grains blended with gofun and bound with nikawa, were applied with a foam roller.
The next step involved a contemporary innovation, a customized formula of #7 gunjo grains bound with nikawa and diluted with water so five layers of gunjo could be applied witha standard high-volume low pressure spray gun with wider orifices to accommodate the mineral particles. Because the formula consists solely of natural ingredients, the spraying process produces no fumes or toxins.
The Holograms
The holograms are an homage to the flower and plants motif ceiling paintings in Buddhist temples, with digitally rendered butterflies against gold, silver, and copper spheres. A thin layer of holographic emulsion adhered to glass with LED was created to provide the color.
The frames are handcrafted by temple woodwork artisans in Kyoto using hinoki, Japanese cypress, the preferred wood fortemples, in the igeta-gumi,squared joinery technique, that requires no hardware. The wood is finished with an organic tannin made from an extract of the shibu-gaki persimmon.