Takayuki Mitsushima with Marina Amada
Saturday, April 13, 2025｜15:00–16:30


There are two boys in Marie Liesse’s Letters to Jean-Lin. They are students at the Institute for the Visually Impaired Youth (INJA) in Paris and are best friends. Both are blind, and the photographs evoke feelings and inspire one of them to speak. There are infinite possibilities in how we engage with words, experiences, memories, sensations, and colors. Together with artist Takayuki Mitsushima, we will explore these themes and his body of work, reflecting on the blossoming of our senses.

Takayuki Mitsushima was born in 1954 in Kyoto and lost his sight at the age of ten. While working as an acupuncturist, he explores new modes of expression that project his physical senses through his own unique methods, including tactile paintings, tactile collages, and the nail series. In 2020, he opened Atelier Mitsushima as a base for practicing new approaches to barriers and disabilities. In 2019, he participated in MOT Satellite 2019: Expanding Map at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo and has taken part in many other exhibitions.

Marina Amada is an expert in organized chaos—she curates and produces art projects. She co-founded the nonprofit organization Spectrum to support and promote diversity in Japan, together with international art curators and experts. Her notable projects include:

• REFLECTION 11/03/11 – Japanese Photographers Facing the Cataclysm (Les Rencontres de la Photographie, Arles, 2024)
• All Things Are Delicately Interconnected (Tokyo Gendai Art Fair, 2024)
• Synchronicity (Kyoto Art Center, 2022)
• NOUS, a citywide public art installation involving 63 artists during the pandemic lockdown (Nice, 2020)

She serves as the ambassador for AWARE—Archive of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions—in Japan.

Language: Japanese

Saki Yamada
Saturday, April 19, 2025｜14:00–16:00

Aya Koda’s essays are based on her own experiences. However, some of them sometimes make me feel like my own experiences when I realize after reading them. Perhaps it is because she was able to put into words, without pretence, the state of being overwhelmed by her experiences.

When I am in nature, including trees, I sometimes feel the same blurring of the boundary between myself and the rest of existence, which is very pleasant. I would like to attempt to recreate such a time for a moment.

—Saki Yamada

Saki Yamada is many voices, expressed through moving images, words, performance, gardens, and mediation, woven in ever-growing, transforming practices. She invites you to gather, to share spaces, and to write personal stories of trees, to become the collective story of a forest.

Language: Japanese

Poetry reading with Kojiro Kisaka, Yuri Kisaka, Foster Mickley
Saturday, April 26｜16:00–18:00


Kojiro Kisaka creates works that combine painting, engraving, the performing arts, and poetry. American artist Foster Mickley works primarily with photography, video installations, and writing. The two Kyoto-based artists have been collaborating for several years, together with young writer Yuri Kisaka.

Poetry is fundamental to their work—a daily practice and a source of inspiration. At Black Cat Day Dream, they will share their imagination and their love of words and sound through a selection of their poem correspondence, inviting guests to read their own poems.

Kojiro Kisaka studied fine arts at Kyoto Seika University. As a young artist, he moved to Finland, where he received scholarships and grants to present award-winning work in solo exhibitions and festivals, including stage productions. Upon returning to Kyoto, he developed a multidisciplinary practice revolving around poetry and painting. Inspired by a love of language, music, and light, his work explores the remembrance of landscapes to come, the dance, and the eternity embedded in the still point—sketching a delicate poetics of time.

Foster Mickley is a poet and visual artist. He has developed a multidisciplinary practice centered on photography and writing, nourished by a longstanding admiration for Japanese photography, deep engagement in literature and poetry circles, and a love of music and painting. An active member of art collectives in New York and Berlin, his creative process reflects a collaborative approach—a way of looking that does not preempt the given, and a practice grounded in the belief that shared imagination unsettles norms and multiplicity undermines authority—so that art can expand the possible.

Yuri Kisaka is an avid reader and a promising writer. She makes her own newspaper, which she sends to her friends. She is interested in living things and is currently writing a Kamogawa Diary—a book in words and pictures describing the nature of the Kamo River and the lives of its wild animals.

Language: Japanese & English

Marc Peter Keane: On Translating the Sakuteiki
Sunday, April 27｜14:00–15:30


Sakuteiki (Records of Garden Making) is the oldest known Japanese text on garden-making—and is considered the earliest garden planning manual in the world. It was written in the mid-to-late 11th century. During the Kamakura period, it became known as Senzai Hisshō, or Secret Selection on Gardens, before acquiring the title Sakuteiki in the Edo period.

This foundational text is the first systematic record of Heian-period gardening styles, traditionally passed down through oral transmission. It defines the art of landscape gardening as an aesthetic pursuit, shaped by the poetic sensibility of both the designer and the site.

The late Professor Jiro Takei translated Sakuteiki into modern Japanese. Together with Marc Peter Keane and a team of experts, they spent two years annotating and producing the English edition. A writer and garden designer, Keane will speak about this experience—one that has been, at once, a collective study, an act of transmission, a creative process, and a work of poetry: the art of translation.

Marc Peter Keane is a garden designer, artist, and author. Having lived in Kyoto, Japan, for over twenty years, his work is deeply influenced by Japanese aesthetics and culture. His current focus explores contemporary expressions of the ancient karesansui style of dry landscape gardening.

Keane’s writing includes books on Japanese gardens such as Japanese Garden Design, Sakuteiki, The Japanese Tea Garden, and Japanese Garden Notes. He has also published collections of essays on nature, art, and gardens, including The Art of Setting Stones and Of Arcs and Circles. His most recent work is the novel Proxima’s Gift.

Language: English

Shuho Hananofu with Ryosuke Ohashi
Thursday, May 1｜16:00–17:30


The Musō Shinkō school of ikebana originated at Jishō-ji Temple, the heart of Higashiyama culture. In dialogue with numerous works of art considered foundational to ikebana, a philosopher and aesthetician portrays the world of Japanese beauty and Zen. These are voices that remind us of the origins and depths of the spirit of these times—often forgotten, yet vivid. They carry, like the wind of the hanashin, the message that flowers have bloomed, announcing blooming still to come.

Professor Ryosuke Ohashi is currently director of the German-Japanese Cultural Institute in Kyoto and the Nishida Kitarō Museum of Philosophy in Kahoku-shi. Before his retirement, he taught at Ryūkoku University in Kyoto, after having served at several universities in Japan and Germany. Ohashi has published extensively on Japanese philosophy, phenomenology, aesthetics, and German idealism. He is regarded as one of the few living exponents of the Kyoto School.

“Flowers bloom and scatter away in the wink of an eye.
Their colors change in perfect harmony with the rhythms of Nature,
as birds sing and the moon waxes and wanes.
People search for hopes,
even in the face of despair.
Those who feel joys when flowers bloom
and sorrows when they wither,
believed that flowers could relieve them from tragedies.
Serving flowers is my everyday practice, and my life.”

Shuho Hananofu was the first “flower head” (hanagata) and Culture Department Director of Jishō-ji (the Silver Pavilion) in Kyoto. A teacher and collaborator to many contemporary artists, she embodies and shares—through a life dedicated to flowers and to the study of sacred arts, craft, and space—a practice of relation and care.

Hananofu – An ikebana master devoted to plants

Language: Japanese

Poetry: A Journey Through Time・Kojiro Kisaka
Friday, May 2｜15:00–16:30

“Poetry is like a ticket in the palm of my hand, taking me on a journey through time, just as a shell tells the story of the sea.”
—Kojiro Kisaka, essay “Design of the Palm”, from Anemone Metory – Wind’s Notebook

Language: Japanese

Akira the Hustler & Foster Mickley: A Conversation
Sunday, May 4｜14:00–15:30

“I have a dream,” said Martin Luther King. Harvey Milk also spoke of his dream, as the United States’ first openly gay mayor.
Countless people—famous and unknown—are talking to their friends and loved ones, sharing their dreams, and making what was impossible yesterday possible today.
I too have many dreams.”

—Akira the Hustler, from A Whore’s Diary

Akira the Hustler was born in Tokyo in 1969. In 2004, he launched the Living Together Project to bring awareness to the HIV-affected community and other minority groups. His recent exhibitions include:

• STREET JUSTICE: Art, Sound and Power, Galaxy – Gingakei, Tokyo (2018)
• Reborn Art Festival 2017, Ishinomaki (2017)
• Love’s Body – Art in the Age of AIDS, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography (2010)

His work is held in public collections including the Collection Lambert, France, and the Watari Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan.

Foster Mickley is a poet and visual artist. He develops a multidisciplinary practice centered on photography and writing, nourished by a longstanding admiration for Japanese photography, deep engagement in literary and poetry circles, and a love of music and painting. An active member of art collectives in New York and Berlin, his creative process reflects a keen collaborative approach—a way of looking that does not preempt the given, and a belief that shared imagination unsettles norms and that multiplicity undermines authority—so that art can expand the possible.

Language: Japanese & English