Scenes of the UAE through Japanese eyes

Leading Japanese artist Koshun Masunaga will display some of her new work - including some on the UAE - during a two-week exhibition at Dubai's Hunar Gallery from Wednesday.
Entitled "Koshun's Souboku - Integrated Energy", the exhibition will show 120 of her works in India Ink - the main media of Japanese art.
Japanese Consul-General Kiyoshi Nishikawa will open the exhibition at 7.30pm on Wednesday and it will be open to the public from 9.30am to 1pm and 4.30pm to 7.30pm.
Al Anood Abdulrahman, owner of Hunar Gallery, said: "Masunaga is a well-known artist in Japan and her works have received critical acclaim in East Asia, Europe, and the U.S."
He said Masunaga had created a new form of art in Japan called Souboku which means "the free flow of ink".
This will be her first art exhibition in the Middle East, which includes some work in India Ink of the Burj Al Arab, women of the UAE and the UAE's desert landscape.
Masunaga, who fell in love with Dubai during her brief visit in April, said: "During a week's stay I experienced a number of cultural shocks. I was surprised and felt emotionally affected by the discovery of a culture nurtured by nature, people with a wealth of feelings, a wonderful desert with a wealth of verdure."
Masunaga was given her first lessons in writing with a single brush stroke and has progressed gradually to creating beautiful forms with India ink, which is characterised by its blackness.
A single line and spots can only be drawn once and cannot be drawn over or erased.
She studied for 15 years with master calligrapher Shunso Machi. After having mastered basic calligraphy, she sought to express her feelings through India ink.
Masunaga will offer a demonstration for the public during her exhibition.
She said: "The ink is created from clay, then mixed with water to give different effects. The different ratio of ink and water creates different effects. Sometimes the clay is 100 years old, maybe more. It takes a lot of time to get the right combination.
"In the Souboku-style paintings, a painter usually draws the same picture a number of times, sometimes it goes up to 100 times or even more. A group of experts then chooses the best one from amongst them.
"All the strokes need to be perfect and can't be touched up, to give a unique look to the shape of the object. So we strike the brush once on the paper to draw a line or a curve.
"If it isn't perfect, we do it on another piece of paper. Sometimes we have to spend weeks together to get the perfect image, sometimes it happens in one attempt."