TAIKO-NO-ASA (Biwa Lake in Morning)

"Taiko-no-asa" — morning on the Taiko (drum), an ancient name for Lake Biwa derived from the lake's drum-like shape — captures the particular quality of early morning light on Japan's largest lake. Lake Biwa in the morning holds the famous misty quality that has been the subject of Japanese poetry and painting for over a millennium: the still water, the mountain silhouettes emerging from morning haze, the gradual brightening from dark to illuminated. Nishijima renders this morning lake scene with the atmospheric sensitivity appropriate to one of Japan's most celebrated landscape subjects.