[Audio Guide]
What is hidden in the depths of this bamboo grove? Though hidden, the forms of two ducks are crouched in the bamboo stalks. The stalks are so dense that it is difficult to individuate them, and the thin lines on the bamboo can be read as drizzling rain, which conveys the feelings of the well-hidden wild birds. The ducks enduring the rain and mist within the thicket is all that is required for us to imagine seeing through the artist’s eyes, as he holds his breath and looks upon the scene. In the early 1980s, when Takeuchi was in his forties, he made a number of works of birds and small animals hidden in the shade of trees, lyrically depicting their interiority. In Yesterday’s Rain, the entirety of the picture surface is rendered in finely layered colors. At the boundary between the early modern and the contemporary period, this work preserves the figurative and the abstract found within nihonga, without losing a sense of presence.
