Keiko Hara: ‘The Poetics of Space, Four Decades of Paintings and Prints’

Keiko Hara’s exploration of her relationship to her surrounding environment has been continually formulated through the artist’s ongoing series titled, Topophilia. Meaning “a strong love of place,” the term topophilia, with its connection to humanistic geography, also represents a universal desire to hold onto ephemeral moments of beauty and sadness as related to conceptions of place—even if unattainable. This mini-survey exhibition chronicles Hara’s unwavering commitment to painting and her unique form of Mokuhanga, Japanese woodblock printmaking, over a 40‑year period. Her abstract compositions are at once immensely sensitive yet executed in vibrant color with references to water, fire, skies, and verdant lands, offering rich metaphorical imagery. Hara’s longtime home in Walla Walla, Washington, situated in an expansive valley flanked by the Blue Mountains, figures centrally within her work as does a more internal investigation into the poetics of space. Tactility of things, their reference to nature, and how we perceive, feel, and understand the universe that we inhabit are all conditions of Hara’s visual enterprise.