Landscape & Memory

The title ”Landscape and Memory”, taken from the books by Simon Schama, was meant to describe the relationship between the Northern Europeans and their forests and the role it has played over the centuries in the behavior and thought of the people and their artists. But the term could be applied in every context of culture that exists. The idea that landscape is genetically imprinted in our memory and passed down, continuing to haunt and permeate our creative unconscious, was one that seemed imbedded in Schama’s ideas although not explicitly stated. This haunting spirit seems to emerge with particular potency in the works of Ken Fukushima and Wei Jane Chir, artists whose life pursuits have often impelled them to traverse between Asia and America.