Ten Thousand Things
Multicultural Webfinds

"Ten Thousand Things" is a Buddhist expression representing the dynamic interconnection and simultaneous unity and diversity of everything in the universe.

Environmental & Connecting Artists: Keiko Miyamori, Chikara Miura & Toshi Makihara

"This wall doesn't partition space. It connects space. Because each part of the wall comes from different places, it connects here and elsewhere."
-- Keiko Miyamori

Visual artist Keiko Miyamori's worldview focuses on connections of all kinds.

In Miyamori's current installation project "Tunagukabe – A Wall for Connection," she is exchanging tiny fragments of bricks found under a living tree in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, with people around the world for tiny fragments of the building blocks of their cities, "Then with these fragments, I plan to construct a wall. This wall divides nothing. Rather it connects – it connects city and nature, nature and human, here and there, here and elsewhere. Miyamori's website provides contact info for anyone who would like to share in this exchange.

In "Imagine Here and There,"a project she created in November 2006 and January 2007, she made rubbings on washi paper, from trees in both the U.S. and Japan, connecting one natural place to another. Miyamori recorded the process, excerpted in this YouTube video.

In an interconnected performance, percussionists Chikara Miura and Toshi Makihara simultaneously performed outdoors, in the U.S. and Japan, using sticks, stones, and found objects and trees on which Miyamori in the U.S. and another artist in Japan created rubbings. Their introduction, on Youtube, is in both English and Japanese. This video in split-frame is of their remarkable and beautiful performance.

These projects were part of the "Green Machine," an interactive, multimedia exhibition 2007 collaboration presented by InLiquid.com, a non-profit art and design network, and the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education, both based in Philadelphia.

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