The River of Time 時の河

吉田亜世美 Yoshida Ayomi, artist

born 1958

The River of Time 時の河 , 2026

Credit line: Courtesy of the artist

Accession number: IA2026.001

On display: Perkins Central Court

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Label texts

Street Nihonga: The Art of Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani

From the opening scene of rain falling lightly onto a tranquil river, The River of Time unfolds as a liquid, shimmering meditation on artistic creation, memory, and lineage. We are submerged into an unstable world where water—falling, rippling, dripping—becomes both medium and metaphor: a passage through time, a space of immersion, and a force that dissolves fixed boundaries.

Punctuated by the steady sound of dripping water, the video oscillates between three generations of women artists from the Yoshida family. Images of artist-in-residence Ayomi Yoshida at work intermingle with archival footage of her grandmother, Fujio Yoshida, painting at an easel, and her mother, Chizuko Yoshida, surrounded by her artwork. Rather than presenting
these artists as discrete figures, the video allows their gestures, movements, and materials to surface and recede like reflections on water, merging past and present into a continuous flow.

As the tempo of the dripping water subtly accelerates, distinctions between generations blur. Memory becomes fluid. Time folds inward. The creative act is no longer singular or isolated, but cumulative—shaped by inheritance, repetition, and transformation. In the final movement, Ayomi’s print of tree limbs seems to emerge from this intermingling of images, as if carried forward by the current formed by grandmother, mother, and daughter.

Calm yet insistent, The River of Time invites viewers not simply to observe artistic creation, but to enter it—immersed in a living river of time, memory, and making.

The Spencer Museum of Art commissioned international artist-in-residence Ayomi Yoshida to create a new work to resonate with the exhibitions "Street Nihonga" and "Brush, Block, and Blood."