Japan

At the end of September 2025, just a few weeks before my departure, I impulsively booked a long dreamt of flight to Japan and left a fortnight later. I took only a carry-on backpack weighing less than seven kilograms, but heavy baggage of naïveté  and ignorance. I needed to detox from an exhausting two-years focussed on making a new body of artwork and insidious habits which included Scandi noir, dark chocolate and spending too long on the computer. Unsurprisingly, most of my old habits returned when I arrived home, but my five solo weeks in Japan were enriching, stimulating and inspiring. Dressed in black, I was a strange mixture of a pilgrim without a faith, an inquisitive, childlike flaneur, and someone enthralled by nature and ancient and contemporary art and architecture. I was not seeking exotic or peak experiences but wanting to pay homage to a country whose aesthetics and spiritual traditions have long influenced my artwork and poetry and how I see the world.

Photographs taken during my 2025 travels in Kyoto, the Setouchi Triennial, Hiroshima, Nara, Kanazawa, Mt. Fuji, Kamakura, Kawagoe and Tokyo.

© Dr. Victoria King 2025.

Below: the time and date of the horrific nuclear bombing of Hiroshima.