Jacqueline Hassink: View, Kyoto: On Japanese Gardens and Temples

Dutch photographer Jacqueline Hassink (born 1966) recently commenced working on a multipart series called View, Kyoto, in which she examines how the interior and exterior spaces of individual structures permeate and face one another. She took photographs of traditional Japanese gardens from within Kyoto's Buddhist temples, placing equal weight on the interior and exterior spaces. In two of the temples, she was allowed to move the sliding rice-paper screens, allowing her to create new, enormous spatial entities. The moss gardens of Saiho-ji and the cherry blossoms in Haradani-in constitute another part of the series. These scenes, which change with the seasons—Hassink calls them "living sculptures"—reflect Japanese aesthetics, which see arranged gardens as artificial likenesses of nature as well as representations of paradise.