Breathing Garden | Bamboo Grove
Breathing Garden | Bamboo Grove is an artistic experiment that connects the participant’s breathing to a space imagined as a bamboo forest, extending the body into the surrounding environment. In this work, Kyō-meichiku—bamboo finished using traditional techniques—is suspended in a grid formation to create an installation space that evokes a bamboo grove. Inside each bamboo pole, a vibration motor is embedded, producing a simple, raw vibrating sound when activated.The participant sits at the center of the bamboo grove and breathes slowly. As they do, irregular, fluctuating vibrations resonate from the surrounding bamboo. The participant’s breath synchronizes with these subtle sounds, which move through the bamboo forest as if traveling through space. Breathing—normally an unconscious bodily activity—becomes an audible movement, forming an acoustic environment. In this way, the participant’s body is extended and integrated into the bamboo grove through breath.
Bamboo is a life form with a remarkably unique structure compared to ordinary trees. Although its interior is almost entirely hollow, it is both strong and flexible due to its high-strength fibers. In typical trees—both deciduous and coniferous—when they grow to about 15 meters in height, the trunk diameter at the base is usually around 25–50 cm. By contrast, bamboo that reaches the same height has a diameter of only about 7–15 cm—roughly one-third to one-quarter that of a tree. Its growth speed is astonishing: bamboo can reach a height of 15 meters in just one to two months, whereas trees generally require 20 to 40 years to grow to the same height.
In botanical classification, bamboo is not a tree but a perennial grass of the Poaceae family—a woody grass—and thus follows a growth pattern fundamentally different from that of trees. Breathing organisms and photosynthesizing organisms sustain and develop life in entirely different ways. Yet, as animals, we too possess internal “vessels” or cavities—such as the respiratory and digestive organs—just as bamboo contains a hollow interior.
In this work, breathing—taking oxygen into the hollow space of the lungs and releasing carbon dioxide—is connected to the hollow interior of bamboo, which supports its growth, and is fed back as vibration and sound. This process can be understood as a call from humans (animals) to bamboo (plants), and a response from bamboo (plants) back to humans (animals).
Through the experience of Breathing Garden: Bamboo Grove, the work seeks to rediscover commonality and coexistence across different forms of life, and to open new perspectives and possibilities for symbiosis.