martin bonadeo | texts | japanese eyes

I have chinese eyes and many times I feel there is some kind of connection between this fact and my distorted optical sensitivity. I use to see everything whiter than other people. Reviewing a japanese prints and sumi-é book I found that is very common to see white backgrounds in this kind of pictures. These kind of images are very close to my own distortion of light. When I started to study this phenomena I found that most of the times oriental art represent shadows instead of lights. One summer day I went outside my studio with my digital camera -a japanese one- set to take pictures in total darkness and I saw in it's screen everything very bright...everything but the shadows, the part of pictures we are used to associate with black. Photo metering shadows I started finding extremely intense colors hidden in object's darkness.

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