Japan’s Dazzling Beauty Transposed into Painting by Alice Tye

Visiting the Japanese archipelago is always an extraordinary experience- especially for a Westerner confronting the urban and rural landscapes of Japan for the first time. Alice Tye, a London-based painter, spent three weeks travelling across Japan in the spring of 2017. Upon returning to England, she turned her memories into paintings- creating enduring manifestations of the fleeting, ephemeral moments first captured through the lens of her camera. 

Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, Naoshima, Koyasan and the Kiso Valley; Alice Tye travelled the length and breadth of Japan on what was her very first trip to Asia. Enchanted in equal measure by the Sakuras and the snaking, city passageways as she was by parking lots and gaudy, neon signs at night, the painter attempted to turn her discoveries of both the urban sprawl and the landscape of rural Japan into something tangible. Armed with just her camera, she collected photos and videos much like any other tourist, and rediscovered them upon return to London.

In the calm of her studio, she immersed herself in these documents, re-living all of the emotions that she’d felt so keenly over those three weeks. From this point on a pressing desire was born to find the most fitting way to transcribe all of her fortuitous meetings and discoveries: moments like the end of a long market day in a Kyoto sidestreet, or the view from the Momosuke bridge whilst waiting for a train. ‘My whole experience travelling around Japan, which admittedly only just scratched the surface of all of the places I could have visited in the country, was overwhelming and a huge culture shock in the best way possible’, Tye said in an interview with online magazine It’s Nice That. Her series of paintings Mono No Aware, meaning The Pathos of Things is an ode to a Japanese expression reminding us of the ephemerality of things and the inevitable nostalgia when they disappear- like the brief, beautiful blossoming of the Sakura heralding the arrival of spring. Still enraptured by her trip to Japan, Tye now wishes for one thing only- to go back to the archipelago to be transported once again, and to further enrich her notebook with memories and paintings.