Sanjusangen-do

Sanjusangen-do — the Hall of Thirty-Three Bays at Rengeo-in Temple in Kyoto — is one of Japan's most extraordinary architectural spaces, its long narrow hall housing 1,001 golden statues of the Thousand-armed Kannon. Asano returned to this temple repeatedly as a subject, drawn by both its architectural singularity and its location in the Higashiyama district he knew intimately as a Kyoto native. This version presents the temple in its characteristic long horizontal profile, the building's extraordinary length — 120 meters, the longest wooden structure in Japan — providing a compositional challenge that Asano met with characteristic geometric confidence.