You enter the wandering forest when you accidentally step over a wandering root. Among the trees, you then usually move in irregular wandering circles that have no beginning or end. It's not so much that you can't get back to the mapped out path of everyday life, as that you find yourself enjoying the aimless wandering through a mysterious forest where anything can happen. The Japanese painter, carver and dancer Sota Sakuma paints such places and carves creatures out of linden wood to inhabit them. Sometimes he also captures them in ink and acrylic on traditional Japanese washi paper. If the plants are mostly real, the inhabitants of his magical forest - be they characters or animals - are, on the contrary, a bit phantasmal, so that reality and fantasy are mixed in his paintings, which only proves that the line between them is not only very thin, but also permeable.
The painter, carver and dancer Sota Sakuma (1977) captures such moments.He paints meticulously small sections of a fantastic forest landscape, while carving creatures out of lime wood to inhabit it. Sometimes he captures it all in ink and acrylic on traditional Japanese washi paper. He was born in Aichi Prefecture, Japan. He studied textile design in Tokyo before devoting himself to carving and painting. Since the turn of the millennium, he has lived in the Czech Republic, where his interest in puppetry originally led him. In Prague he studied stage design at the DAMU.
