WINDOW RESEARCH INSTITUTE

Clear air, born from the trees, the land. White steam that murmurs from a kitchen. Plants that sprout from the earth, and flowers floating in a vase. The pigments in the sky at sunset, primary colors in an LCD TV.
Human lives and nature are tethered at the window, where a multitude of colors merge and mingle. From Korea, Japan, India, Thailand, and one realm of the imagination–––––these are multicolored stories about windows written and painted by Korean watercolor artist Byun Young Geun.

This is something that happened while I was walking around Tokyo. I’d passed the front of this brand new building where they’d installed an art piece on the ground floor that looked like a big waterfall. Around the waterfall there was a line of trees about ten metres high, creating this scene as if an oasis had suddenly materialised in the middle of the city. I got a bit closer and tried peeking through the glass of the curtain wall to see inside. Tokyo, its trees and buildings, were reflected back at me. And beyond that, inside the building you could just make out the oasis. That weird scene, at once nature ʻexternal’ and nature ʻinternal’, stirred something inside of me, something deep down. I guess we’ve entered an era where you can start putting anything inside a building.