We asked professors from Kyoto University of the Arts to choose five different books from their personal libraries and five pages that they found beautiful. The selected books are displayed open on the floor in a public space on campus. The selected pages are unattributed and visitors are welcome to take them to the reading area.

This installation is designed as a collaborative garden. It is an experiment in the library as an open collective, an anonymous gift. It is also an invitation for diverse and creative individuals to share an intimate space.

We believe that reading is a very familiar encounter, dialogue and experience.

By sharing and holding the selected beautiful pages, the books will harbor a kaleidoscopic way of thinking, a transformative sensitivity to beauty, and the joy of rediscovery and discovery. Books offer encounters, multiple voices, ways of being, thoughts and dreams that circulate with time.

— Isabelle Olivier



The guests and artists, in paper boats, crossed many shimmering rivers or one river many times. They arrived at an island where their name, age, and language were only choices, one choice among many in the many combinations of the dream. It could seem impossible that the Earth be anything other than gardens.

It is understood that the exhibition was based on a book, though the name of the book has been lost with time. Some say it was a book of a thousand maps, others a poem that could only be heard when singing, and for others a blank page.

What is certain is that no two things are alike in the world. The visitors to the exhibition had only to imagine what they held in their hands.

— Foster Mickley