Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park’s chief curator, Joseph Becherer, walks us through how the Japanese Garden came together and what it took to get there.
Transcript:
Joseph Becherer: We’re in a very special place, and a relatively new place here on the campus of Meijer Gardens. This is the Richard and Helen DeVos Japanese Garden. It’s an eight acre site in the northeastern part of our main campus. There had been a long-standing interest on behalf of Meijer Gardens, going back fifteen years or so, to explore the option of international gardens, and always what happened was a Japanese garden kept bubbling up to the surface as one of the most popular ideas for an international garden. We conducted a national search for a landscape designer, a landscape architect, that could fulfill this vision.
Hoichi Kurisu from Kurisu International. Hoichi was born in Hiroshima and was raised in Japan, studied landscape design in Tokyo. One of the most interesting things about Hoichi as an architect is that he believes and follows a kind of tradition or a school for garden design, and that is one that emphasizes space. You get these changes in elevation, you get these changes in physical attitudes, and as you walk around, you’re perspective changes. There are no real straight paths, there are lots of curving paths, secondary, tertiary paths. He really creates a very special spacial environment; it’s almost like walking into a painting.
The unique element and really what becomes signature for Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park is the innovative tap that we took in incorporating contemporary sculpture. Working with Hoichi, we’ve placed seven major new pieces in this garden environment. For all of these works, we decided not to work exclusively with Japanese sculptors, but we wanted to work with artists that in whole or in part convey some of the ideas about what a Japanese garden is all about. These are seven pieces by some of the world’s most important sculptors.
You have to think about the Japanese garden as more than just a garden and more than just a place with sculpture, but you have to think about the whole experience really as an experience with a work of art. Leave everything else behind and fully let yourself go and enjoy the beauty, enjoy the design, enjoy this uxorious environment, and allow yourself, at least in your imagination, to be transported to another place.