"Phoenix Rebirth: Echoes of Ash" 

"Phoenix Rebirth" was born in 2020, amid the shadowed stillness of the early COVID-19 pandemic, from the hands of Tokyo-based artist Hiroshi Mehata, who wove introspection and historical insight into this abstract painting during the confines of lockdown. 

​

Reimagining the elegant tradition of Japan’s Rinpa school through a modern lens, Mehata employs alloy foil to craft a muted tapestry of dulled greens and golds, punctuated by faint traces of white and red—delicate echoes of a flower’s breath symbolizing life’s fleeting essence—reflecting the desaturated streets and pervasive unease of a world stripped of vibrancy. 

​

This deliberate embrace of a somber palette etches the weighty reality of the pandemic, yet it is not an endpoint; it stands as a vital chapter in Mehata’s pandemic narrative, a quiet prelude to the vibrant resurgence of The Color Cleanser (2023), where his signature dynamic colors return. ​

​

While the shimmering gold leaf nods to Rinpa’s evocation of eternity, the alloy’s subtle imperfections hint at time’s inevitable wear, reflecting humanity’s timeless yearning for permanence and the inescapable truth of collapse. 

Mehata’s deep reverence for history fuses Rinpa’s refined beauty with a contemporary narrative, expanding personal pandemic reflections into a universal meditation on intellect’s tension with nature’s flow, rooted in the Buddhist principle that “the individual is all,” where the phoenix’s rebirth embodies the cycle of individual endings sustaining collective eternity. 

​

The dulled harmony of green and gold evokes wholeness, the fragile white and red whisper ephemerality, weaving a visual hymn to impermanence and renewal, a restrained beauty that accepts the pandemic’s gloom as a passage to color’s return, deepened by the drone music’s haunting resonance.