My childhood stamp collection contained strange and wonderful images from a place called Nippon. In the mid-90's, I went to Japan for the first time and connected my stamps to a real place.
The recognition was sweet, and I immediately felt comfortable and in some way familiar, as if I knew this place through my stamps. But unless you are Japanese I don’t think one will ever really know and understand Nippon.
Japan presented me with aesthetic visual impressions. Even though these visuals are so clearly created and controlled completely by humans, I often found them pleasing and meditative to look at. The Japanese have created a society based on serenity in repetitions, colour and orderliness. And then now and again, human interaction disrupts the neatness, but only for a short while, then everything falls back into the predicted way things ought to be.
About ten years after my first visit I made frequent trips to Japan, and I collected this body of work over a period of two years. They are my Nippon stamps with koi, torii, Fuji-san, and the white powdered necks of geisha.