Time Passes Over the Old House

As I age, I develop a deep fondness for tiled roofs (Giwa Jibung). Just looking at them makes me feel cozy and warm with sentiment. I regret the loss of thatched-roof houses, but I am thankful to at least be able to gaze upon the tiled ones. When I think of the ancestors who lived and breathed beneath that roof, it feels even more comforting and familiar. We are currently living in a time where past, present, and future coexist.

Just as decades instantly flash by in a video played at dozens of times the speed, I wonder if our lives, too, flow away so transiently. Yet, this feeling is not nihilism. It is merely the realization that there is nothing absolute for us to fully anchor ourselves to or set down roots. The world constantly moves, changes, disappears, and is born again.

Above the tiled roof in my painting, billowy clouds and drifting blades of grass float by. The bold straight line traversing the space is both the fleeting current of time and the finitude of humanity unable to obstruct that flow. The tiled roof stands still, like an old memory, but the things that sweep over it never stop.

This painting is like a 'Landscape of Time'. The seemingly fixed architecture and the freely drifting nature, the stagnant past and the flowing present, coexist on a single canvas. The architecture anchors the earth, while nature floats the sky. Countless emotions, untold stories, and presences that have vanished but still linger, pass over the tiles on the wind. What flows over it is not merely clouds. It was, in fact, Time itself.