Mono no aware (物の哀れ mono no aware?, lit. “the pathos of things”), also translated as “an empathy toward things,” or “a pity toward things,” is a Japanese term used to describe the awareness of the transience of things and a gentle sadness at their passing. It also is referred to as the “ahness” of things/life/love. The term was popularized by the Edo-period scholar Motoori Norinaga, and was originally an idea from literary criticism. In his criticism of The Tale of Genji, Motoori noted that mono no aware is the crucial emotion that moves readers. Generally, its scope is not limited to Japanese literature but affects the Japanese view of the world in general (see also sakura).1

Knock Knock!

We know it from the fairytale of Little Red Riding Hood. The little girl has walked through the woods to her grandmother’s house to deliver cake and wine. She has collected flowers on her way and forgotten all about herself. There are always more beautiful flowers a little bit further into the woods. Deeper. Deeper inside - herself or the woods? Maybe it is the silence that compels us in the fairytales of the Grimm Brothers. ”Remember to say hello as soon as you enter the living room, and do not stand around looking about” says the mother advising Little Red Riding Hood before she leaves the house. Do not stand around looking about! Why not? Mystery and sweetness go together in fairytales from all over the world. And both the Grimm Brothers and Hans Christian Andersen capture an audience that is willing to open up their senses and continue into the unknown.

Yuji Watabe is a young artist, born 1974 in the Japanese prefecture Mie. With Japanese accuracy you will find out on the Internet that this place has 1.8 million inhabitants divided between a quarter of a million children under 15 years old, half a million over 64 years old and the rest is somewhere in the middle. Let’s make it clear: factual descriptions characterize Japanese culture. Yuji Watabe is no exception. During the last couple of years he has persistently worked with only few motifs that he, in an almost scientific way, dissects – though not with a scalpel but with the simplest artistic tools for his exploration: pencil and paper.


The artist reproduces young girls in everyday clothes presenting themselves for the viewer’s eyes. One person on every piece of paper always closely ”described” as if there was a secret hidden in telling and drawing things exactly as they are without getting funny ideas and adding patterns of imagination.
It is an unusual photographic procedure. But not unusual if you are interested in parallel universes as the ones generated in the art of the Swedish dramatist, photographer, painter and alchemist: August Strindberg. He also had a passion for the simple. His photographies of faces taken with a Wundercamera actually reproduce persons in the scale of 1:1. The writer and genius Strindberg thought it was magical how the pictures had a hypnotic effect on the viewer. According to Strindberg a picture contains a broader reality than the eye meets. Strindberg’s method is equivalent of the one of Yuji Watabe: we see a young girl but we know she is not there. It is something we imagine. Yuji Watabe adds to this as he makes the titles of the pictures point to the mystery: the drawings are called Ghosts.
Japan’s literary and pictorial art traditions are connected to each other. In fact everything in Japanese culture is connected. The storytelling and the fairytale, the detail and the sudden changes of the everyday happen with a vehemence, which is closely sketched and planned. If you want to know the future you can influence it. If you want to know the present you have to be awake. If you want to know the past you need intuition. Time stops in Yuji Watabe’s drawings of anonymous persons – or “ghosts” – while the girls slowly seem to disappear from the paper. Gentle dots and strokes create a prodigy, a motif, vaporized as a comet tail in front of our eyes. In this way past, present and future are staged.

Yuji Watabe’s Forests drawings create forfeiture pictures and spaces of possibilities. Here, the eye can wander freely without focus, contrary to the portraits. While Ghosts create different shades of “Little Red Riding Hood”, this innocent, familiar, conscientious girl with a propensity to lose herself, the Forests motifs are the very scenery.

This is a model of beauty and anxiety: An aesthetic room of possibilities and a scary reminder of a lost centre at the same time. The eye goes deeper and deeper into the woods without going anywhere.
It is like seeing double, which is a universe that Yuji Watabe examined in a series of works using transparent materials. But Yuji Watabe does not play hide and seek. Everything is available to the eye. Regarding what we really see the consciousness is blurred when looking at or standing in front of or “inside” the work. And what is it that we see and perceive with? Art arouses feelings.
It is an emotional practice. The human being is moving around with extensive pathos and in an atmospheric stratum. Meanwhile Yuji Watabe’s inviting and tempting girl-portraits and wood interiors call for the viewer like Lorelei’s Sirens. Mermaid-like shapes call to the sailors that pass the rocks on the Rhine. The woman and the scenery have made a pact of seduction, losing oneself and loss. This is life and death in a classic tale. Yuji Watabe’s drawings are a version of the same pact. Girls calling out, drawing the spectator closer with their hypnotic look and the woods that seem deeper and deeper as the days pass and the heart beats. We have made it.
 Are you awake?


- Erik Steffensen