I first met Sarah at the National Art Center of Tokyo. She was standing in front of the newest piece of the Time collection of now four blue paintings authored by Arita Morishige depicting an iron rail-track aligned with the vanishing point lines, ultimately disappearing at the horizon. The first piece hit the museum in 2012 and was fancily titled Change. 2013 saw the arrival of the second piece, called Heaven and Earth, and the 2014 addition was given the same name as the first one. Unless his mastery of the language is of superior caliber, the name of the painting Sarah was standing in front could be translated to The direction of the wind. Awed by the sight, bold and young, she gnawed her lips, and wonder chained my tongue as I grasped the glamour of her eyes and warmness of her cheeks. The painting was split in two rectangular halves. On the right half, the beginning of a storm laid its changing, earth-scrapping winds on the horizon where the iron tracks were no more. The tornadoish clouds swept the vast, empty land right to left, though its intentions were ambiguous.
Sarah turned around, looked at her watch, then looked at me, then back at the painting, and finally back at me, and that’s when I confessed the questions that kept my mind brimful and consequently staring at her. She introduced herself as Sarah, she was not an artist nor an art student, but she said she ran a few businesses, and these sometimes collided with art, and some other times she needed art to make sense of them. After a few white lies, I expressed a genuine will of discussion about the painting, and she pointed out that the clouds were stormy clouds. A storm was coming. I loved that idea in many ways, one of the main ones being the fact that a storm that is looming from the horizon sort of made everything more transcendental, more grandiose and enrapturing; and, if you will, more sinister and ill-fated. But the storm was flawed in the sense that it had a beginning and a direction, and that left little doubt about “where to go from there”.
“A storm is coming to Tokyo, and I am afraid my businesses here might be affected.”
“How so?”
“Storms are never good, the council will be busy gambling.”
She replied that! But that wasn’t an answer to my question. What was that supposed to mean, anyway… My mind needed to draw a conclusion, so I concluded she was crazy. But I do like crazy people, so I waited a few seconds to see what was what. She didn’t defuse the confusion, and instead “I’ll see you around, I guess!”-ed me, and off she was.
I then asked the staff if it was okay to take a photograph of a painting, and she agreed as long as I didn’t shoot with flash. The PA said something very long in Japanese, and the subsequent clarification for foreigners was reduced to “The gallery will be closing soon.” I set out towards the gift shop, thought about buying a T-shirt with a significantly pixelated Mona Lisa in it, but after seeing the price tag I had a second thought that was very different from the first one, so I looked around for Sarah and then I took myself to the door and made it for the train station. I got out at Shinjuku, lively and frantic as the night was growing colder, and got lost two times using Maps until I found my way to a tiny pub called “Open”, which was a reggae bar. A very good sound system was singing about stepping out of Babylon, and Zawadi Band was playing live later that night and Sarah was gambling big numbers in the backstage, but I didn’t know that yet.
