"The gathering of soft, graceful figures has at some point been pervaded by a transparent decay, and in the very air they breathe there is already the smell of death."
-Yukio Mishima
Mishima: Fire over Wood
This week's anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings has come and gone. Trite speeches, touching articles, preposterous foreign-policy claims, along with images of candles and peace origami.
I was even going to post one photograph along those lines myself.
Luckily, I chose another approach, deciding that it was more appropriate to emphasize not the event itself, but the the general aftermath--for decades to come--of WWII, Modernity's greatest ideological and military battle:
We live in an age in which there is no heroic death.
― Yukio Mishima
And:
The cynicism that regards hero worship as comical is always shadowed by a sense of physical inferiority.
― Yukio Mishima
And so I made a portrait of Mishima out of tea.
As with my other "natural portraits," there is a level of necessary stylization, considering the constraints of the medium. (In other words, it is much easier to draw a realistic image using traditional means.)
Tea is especially unforgiving.
You breathe, and the beauty is destroyed.