Apocalypse Poem by gershon hepner

Unfolding like the beauty of a screen
of autumn maple and a flowering cherry
upon Mount Fuji, and project a scene
that’s so exquisite I now want to bury
myself inside you, not standing back,
admiring you as I do often from
afar, but in a space where there’s no lack
of intimacy, casting all aplomb
aside, while you allow me to encroach
upon the beauty that you now unfold.
I travel first class and not coach,
impatient to embrace you and to hold
you in my arms so that I may inspect
the details of your beauty’s craftsmanship,
inspired by its gorgeous architect
to tour you in my most entrancing trip.
Like the artist who once used his brush
to paint the screen, I’ll brush you with my lips,
but unlike him, there is a chance I’ll rush,
approaching you in my apocalypse.

Inspired by Lee Lawrence’s review of an exhibition of Japanese folding screens at the Chicago Art Institute (An Unfolding Beauty, WSJ, July 22,2009) :

'Beyond Golden Clouds' is a show at the Art Institute of Chicago that will bring you to your knees - or, more precisely, to a crouch. Not immediately, however. First you need to savor the presentation of 23 Japanese folding screens while standing, just as their original users would have encountered them upon entering a room. Selected from the collections of the Art Institute and the Saint Louis Museum of Art, the screens span more than 450 years of a genre that Japanese artists adopted from China (either directly or through Korea) in the eighth century and that continues to thrive and evolve both in style and usage. Because of their fragility, nine screens will be exchanged with comparable works midway through the show. Most screens sport six panels, come in pairs, stand about five feet tall and function as partitions. In this museum setting, the folding screens - or byobu - are put to work partitioning a vast hall into four concatenating galleries. Each screen stands next to its mate on a low, unobtrusive platform with no protective glass between it and the viewer. The effect is stunning, highlighting both the beauty and -three-dimensionality of the works. Stand off to the side and the accordion pleats sliver the composition, popping every other panel into view. Face them, and you can appreciate why the byobu became a prized form of Japanese art: Together, a pair can exceed 140 square feet, an expanse that is doubled when the artist chooses to paint both front and back. The show includes two such screens: the late 17th-century 'Flowering Cherry and Autumn Maples With Poem Slips' by Tosa Mitsuoki, with a bamboo grove on the verso, and Noguchi Shohin's 'The Gathering at the Orchid Pavilion' painted in 1900. Its front features a landscape in classical Chinese style, while on its back geese flit among reeds against a silver background…
Some motifs recur throughout the ages and survive in modern screens - the inclusion of calligraphy, the predilection for gold, floral imagery and an ever-inventive use of clouds. But as is viscerally apparent as you step into the last gallery, the form has also evolved. Most screens retain the traditional proportions, but their pictorial elements have grown larger, from the calligraphic characters that Morita Shiryu brushed on with bold strokes of thick metallic paint in his 1969 'Dragon Knows Dragon' to the sliver of moon in Kayama Matazo's 1968 'Star Festival.' And as with the show's nine-foot-tall shimmering finale - five irregularly shaped screens covered with overlapping acrylic gold leaf from Okura Jiro's 'Mountain Lake Series' (1990) - these recent works no longer invite you into an intimate space. They demand that you stand back and admire.

7/22/09