-imagination projected-
2025
Advised by Min Yeo
The thesis transcribes a methodology to design with artifacts of cultural landscapes. This methodological experiment unfolds in three episodes—deconstruction, reconstruction, and projection. It begins with Picture Book Sumida River A Glance of Both Shores, a series of Hokusai’s woodblock prints along the Sumida River. Mass-produced in the early 19th century, the prints reflected and cultivated the public imagination of the river. Upon them, the thesis executes a series of acts to produce interventions in the contemporary landscapes. The serial actions allow the project to oscillate between reality and images. The resulting street painting interventions aim to pivot the external perception of the river, which became obscured during modern urbanization, with optical harmony and dissonance. In doing so, the thesis contributes to the discourse around design methodology, representation, and public imagination.
Distortions, voids and flatness emerge in oscilating between reality and drawings.
P icture Book Sumida River A Glance of Both Shores is a series of woodblock prints along the Sumida River in Tokyo. It was produced by Hokusai in the early 19th century. As the prints progress the season transitions from spring to summer, autumn and then winter. Geographically they shift from downstream to upstrem. The book has been mass-produced and widely circulated among the public since its production to this day.
Each print is deconstructed into a set of 12 images. The followinngs are the parameters.
Figureground: Front, Middle, Back, Sky
Subject: Human, Vehicle, Vegetation, Animal
Color: Red, Green, Blue, Yellow
The elements in the prints are extracted, abstracted and extruded in an oblique way. landscape. They are shuffled, descaled, rotated to produce a set of new scenes.
The scenes produced in Episode 02 are projected onto the streetscapes along the Sumida River in contemporary Tokyo.
Site 01- 05
Site 01- 05
Painting is a process of applying liquid solutions to a solid surface. Thus, together with color paints, the existing materials of the streets, such as asphalt, stone, cement and concrete, are the agent of the design. With the paints coated, the existing texture will be flattened to hide and reveal the materialities of the mundane streets.
Alongside other landscape paintings Hokusai liked to draw supernatural creatures. They are called Yokai in Japanese.
妖怪 yokai
妖 yo : seductive, alluring, elegant, sensual, mystical…
怪 kai : mysterious, suspicious, weird…
Critiquing on conventional modes of representation, the thesis attempts to capture and foreground those charms that are often overlooked yet present in all landscapes around us.
2025/05/16