Specimens as Staffage: Projection and Taxidermy on the Nature Wall, Takao 599 Museum
標本を点景にする森 — 高尾599ミュージアム《NATURE WALL》
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A few minutes on foot from Takaosanguchi, the terminus of the Keio Line, a low building appears, sheathed in cedar-board louvres that recall the grain of bark. The first thing you meet inside is a white wall 16 metres wide and 3.5 metres high. A beech tree stands out from it in relief, and around it — a giant flying squirrel, a marten, a badger, an owl — the taxidermy mounts of animals that live on Mount Takao and its surroundings are arranged as if perched on the branches and the trunk. They are specimens, so of course they do not move. Time has stopped, and they are held fixed within the white plane.
Then the whole wall darkens, and light enters. Along the contours of the mounts, or threading through the gaps between them, dappled sunlight falls, leaves thicken, snow settles, and buds break again. For about seven minutes, the four seasons of Mount Takao turn one full circle around animals that have stopped. The unmoving specimens remain; only the background behind them, the ground beneath them and the space above them keep moving, as image. This is NATURE WALL, at the TAKAO 599 MUSEUM.
The Altitude That Became a Name
The "599" is Mount Takao's elevation — 599 metres — worn directly as a name. The museum opened on 11 August 2015, the year before the national holiday "Mountain Day" was first instituted and timed to that same date of 11 August, as a tourism facility of the City of Hachioji. Admission is free. It was conceived as a place in which to "reread" Mount Takao — a mountain on the fringe of the capital that nonetheless draws close to three million climbers a year, and is known for the richness of its ecosystem — either before the ascent or after coming back down.
The City of Hachioji holds jurisdiction, and day-to-day management is entrusted to designated administrators. What deserves attention is that almost the whole of this public facility has been designed under a single design intention. The overall art direction — the spatial composition, the bespoke typeface and signage used throughout the building, the manner in which the specimens are shown, right down to the merchandise in the shop — was in the hands of Daigo Daikoku of the Daikoku Design Institute at Nippon Design Center. The "NATURE COLLECTION" display, in which plants and insects are sealed in transparent acrylic resin — golden orchids and swallowtail butterflies set out season by season, as though picked on the spot a moment ago — was likewise designed as part of this consistent design language. The museum is at once a facility that introduces Mount Takao and an instance of thoroughgoing branding.
What It Means to Lay an Image Over a Taxidermy Mount
The technical core of NATURE WALL lies in one arrangement: projecting moving image onto stationary three-dimensional objects. Real taxidermy mounts are physically fixed to the wall, and projection mapping is laid over their surfaces and the space around them. The landscape-format plane, roughly 16 metres by 3.5, unfolds the ecology of Mount Takao sideways and further sideways, like a single handscroll painting.
The moving image was conceived, staged and produced by WOW, with Daihei Shibata directing. The music was composed by Umitaro Abe, and the museum's production credits also carry the name of Keigo Oyamada (Cornelius). The techniques of character animation are used for the animals' movements, so that the "real bodies" of the mounts are given slightly humorous gestures. Construction of the wall itself was handled by Uchida Yoko. Development ran to two and a half years, by the production team's own record, and the goal set was to reconcile scientific accuracy about the ecology with a design that would not wear thin over a long run.
Permanent though it is, the wall does not run the same footage all day long. Works of about seven minutes are switched on the hour, alternating two programmes: Takao wo Meguru and A TREE OF TAKAO. The same wall and the same arrangement of mounts serve as the base, and only the projected image is exchanged, so that a visitor meets a different Mount Takao depending on the hour. The skeleton is shared — a beech tree at the centre, the mountain's residents gathered around it — while the imagery shifts its expression little by little within the repetition.
The Specimen as Tenkei
Let us turn, for a moment, to painting. East Asian ink landscape painting observes a convention by which figures, boats and houses are brushed in, very small, amid grand mountains and rivers. These are called tenkei, and they serve both to establish the scale of the landscape and to set into an unmoving world of mountains and water some trace of human activity. In Western landscape painting the nearest term is staffage. The landscape is the protagonist and the tenkei no more than a small accompaniment; yet it is only because that small presence is there that the landscape first rises up as something "alive".
NATURE WALL inverts this relation of the tenkei within space, and folds it over on itself. Ordinarily, in the signage of a city, it is the screen that is the "moving point" set into the landscape, while the architecture and streets around it form the unmoving ground. On this wall, however, what does not move is the taxidermy, and what supplies the moving landscape is the projection. The specimens behave as tenkei placed within a landscape of mountains and water, and the image sets in motion a background that ought by rights to be still — carrying with it the flow of time that is the four seasons. Ground and figure, stillness and motion, have changed places against the arrangement we are used to.
Taxidermy is a technique for preserving a creature by stopping time. It fixes death once, cuts the body away from the time of decay, and so keeps its form. When moving image is laid over that, the time that had been stopped — the largest and most repetitive of times, the cycle of the four seasons — returns to the space immediately around the specimens and nowhere else. The unmoving body remains; only the air surrounding that body begins to breathe. The substance of the museum's own phrase, "to express the nature of Mount Takao dynamically", lies in this double exposure of stillness and motion.
A Wall That Sells Nothing
One further thing cannot be overlooked: this enormous screen sells not a single product. Standing before 16 metres of glowing surface, a visitor encounters neither a logo nor a price. All the wall speaks of is what lives on that mountain — the one about to be climbed, or the one just descended. Held in public hands, open free of charge, and placed at the entrance and the exit of a bodily experience, the climb itself — NATURE WALL is one example of a permanent screen running on a logic other than that of the city's advertising surfaces. TENKEI has followed, in place after place, the moment when a city's moving-image surfaces rise up as tenkei within a landscape of tourism or commerce (the outdoor programme at Ebisu, Matsuyama's morning minute). The one at TAKAO 599 MUSEUM is, within that lineage, a rare instance in which the subject placed at the centre is a concrete piece of nature itself: a mountain.
The white wall opens a ma — an interval — between one specimen and the next. Into that blank it sets the time of the seasons. Before this wall, where a forest keeps turning only in the space around creatures that do not move, we too come to spend the short stretch of time before and after entering the mountain as a landscape of its own.
Sources
Operations Record
- City of Hachioji (owner); operated by Keio Agency and Keio Setsubi Service
- Tokyo
- Museum commission — Commissioned by the City of Hachioji as a tourism facility; overall direction of space, film and typeface by Nippon Design Center (Daikoku Design Institute), with the moving image produced by WOW
- Permanent; the Nature Wall runs c. 7-minute films, alternating “Takao wo Meguru” and “A TREE OF TAKAO” each hour
- A wall c. 16m wide × 3.5m high; projection mapping cast over a beech-tree relief and taxidermy mounts
- 2015-08
- Active