SOTOROJI #3

This installation belongs to the SOTOROJI series. Just as the soto-roji—the outer garden of the Japanese tea ceremony—ushers guests from the everyday into the realm of yūgen, the work harnesses a contemporary affordance: when people see a QR code, they instinctively reach for their phone to scan it. Taking as its motif an ancient pine revered as a yorishiro for the deity of the performing arts, the piece renders the tree’s form with more than 34,000 QR codes. The result is a threshold where physical and digital, ordinary and extraordinary, reality and the subtly profound intersect. Each scan invites the viewer to step from a finite game into an infinite one.

Selected for the inaugural Artist Scholarship at “Devcon,” the international developers’ conference organized by the Ethereum Foundation, Ryuta Aoki created and exhibited this work, which was experienced by many attendees at Devcon 7 in Bangkok, Thailand, and received high acclaim.

chanoyu (the Japanese tea ceremony): It is a Japanese comprehensive art form composed of gardens, architecture, painting, calligraphy, incense, flower arrangement, sound, utensils, food, clothing, and etiquette. It is a traditional Japanese ritual deeply connected not only with Zen but also with other Japanese traditional performing arts like Noh and Kabuki. The TEA-ROOM, composed of artists involved with tea ceremony, reinterprets and expresses the tea ceremony using contemporary situations and objects.

soto-roji (the outer garden): Tea masters admired the world of profound subtlety depicted in ink paintings and expressed this worldview in tea rooms and tea gatherings. Tea rooms, including their gardens, are designed to gradually lead into this world of profound subtlety. The garden path from the entrance (rojiguchi) to the middle gate is called the outer garden, where guests participating in tea gatherings brush off worldly dust, immerse themselves in the world of profound subtlety, and engage in higher-dimensional play.