Dragon Horse Mountain, 2026. Single-channel 4K video, colour, sound, 10 min.
Dragon Horse Mountain
The mountain was red as blood.
Our house stood beneath its sparsely wooded slopes. Those who lived below it carried a persistent fear that one day heavy rain would bring the bare earth crashing down over the village. Even to a child, it looked like a great wounded beast, stripped bare and crouching. Whenever they could, the adults took the neighbourhood children by the hand and climbed the mountain to plant saplings. For the children it was play; for the adults, a sacred rite to appease the mountain’s anger. It was called Dragon Horse Mountain, a sacred name joining the mythical dragon with the running horse. Here, in the thirteenth century, the cavalry of the Mongol Empire had fed and raised their horses in preparation for the invasion of Japan. Here began a history in which nine hundred ships would meet the divine wind, the kamikaze, and be wrecked. History, already resembling myth, passed into legend under the name of an imaginary creature, the dragon horse. From this place it had once risen into the sky with a roar. Now it lay here, wounded and crouching. Whenever it rained, the wounded body of that enormous beast shed earth red as blood.
I remember the unease of the adults listening to rain through the night. I can still hear my mother’s heart beating. The young son, whose lungs were weak, was taken farther into the mountains, to a temple of Buddhist nuns deep in the valleys of the Dancing Crane Mountain. While his mother went in search of medicine, the child was entrusted to the old nuns, and to the power of the mountain.
There were no mobile phones or internet then, and even the radio could barely find a signal. Few people came or went in that winter mountain. Waiting for his mother to return, the boy had to endure a season with the mountain as his companion and broken branches as his toys. In the dimness before dawn came the sound of the moktak, the wooden gong, the smell of incense, and the voices of the nuns reciting sutras. Their chanting travelled on the heavy winter wind, spreading in great echoes through the white mountain, cold with snow. The mountain became a place of sacred prayer. Sometimes a branch, unable to bear the weight of snow, snapped. The sound broke like an explosion, bringing another tremor of unease, a premonition that something terrible might happen. His heart began to race, as his mother’s once had.
A thousand years ago, in the Heian period, most sacred precincts barred women and those whose bodies were deemed impure. This sacred ground in Japan’s Kii Mountains, where Shinto and Buddhism intertwined, admitted everyone: royalty and aristocrats, commoners, women, and the sick. To enter the Kumano Sanzan was understood as dying once and being born again. It came to be called the Land of Rebirth.
On the train from Osaka to Tanabe, the gateway to the Kumano Kodō, some fifty faces in the carriage were inclined towards a light no larger than a palm. Only the thumbs moved upwards at regular intervals. Mountains passed outside the window, but no one looked at them. No one was looking at the same thing, yet everyone was looking in the same posture. The screen each person saw had been selected by an algorithm calculating what had held their attention over the preceding months. The time spent on the latest screen became data that would shape the next. We are receiving, in place of the world, the records of what has caught our attention. We cannot leave this theatre in the palm of our hands. Even what we want is taught to us here. We never chose to enter, yet we find ourselves alone in a room deep inside it. Seeing only what we want to see is not a failure of will. We inhabit rooms built to keep what we do not want to see from arriving, and we can no longer find the door. AI, a mirror the size of the Earth, has taken us from the mountains and confined us to the palms of our hands.
The path from Tanabe led into the mountains over stones worn hollow at their centres by a thousand years of footsteps. Along the way, small shrines, said to number ninety-nine, lay half-buried in moss. No signal reached those mountains. The machine in my pocket remained silent all day, a silence like that of the winter mountain long ago. On the day I came down after ten days in the mountains, a typhoon arrived. My flight was postponed, and I had to remain in Shirahama for another day. This seaside town still bears the traces of Minakata Kumagusu, who protected slime moulds, a life between plant and animal. At Muro-no-Yu, I wash the day away. Bathing is another rite. In the morning, driftwood lay along the beach at Shirahama, cast up by the sea during the night. Wood that had left the forests of Kumano and followed the river, drifting through another time, had at last been given back by the sea.
In seventeenth-century Dutch vanitas still lifes, the fly beside the fruit always signified decay and time. Driftwood is a body that has been decaying as it travels from the forest along the waterways. The form of a tree that lived for hundreds of years passes through the neural connections of a creature that lives for forty days, and becomes sound.
The more precisely we read a form, the more readily we feel that we know the life it has lived. Yet even with a map of the fruit fly’s brain in our hands, every cell and every connection visible, we still do not know how the world feels to a fruit fly. A map of high resolution is not the territory. Between seeing the connections and knowing what it is to live through them, a distance remains uncrossed. The sense that we can manipulate something sometimes runs ahead of the conviction that we understand it. ‘Mnemosyne’ becomes a name that slows that conviction.
The sacred mountain opens a centre from which the world can find its bearings. A place occupying only a small area on a map can exert an immense gravity within one person’s world. Before Dragon Horse Mountain was something I looked at, it was the place from which I learned to look at other things. Factory smoke, an old house, and the hands of people planting trees were all there. On the Dancing Crane Mountain, where my mother took me as a child, the moktak at dawn is still there, and the incense spreading through a doorway, and the time spent waiting for her to return with medicine.
A machine repeats the gestures of mourning, though it does not know what it has lost. Yet where have these rites come from, with their postures of fervent prayer and grief? How long have we repeated movements we learned before we understood their meaning? That something has appeared convincingly, plausibly, is no evidence that it ever existed, or that its inner life has become known. Yet AI increasingly allows the ability to produce the forms of the world to pass for the ability to understand it. We can no longer distinguish whether we believe because we have come to know, or feel that we know because we have first been shown something believable.
Through nine reincarnations, what to follow takes form. Computation and matter, bodies and machines alter one another’s outcomes, still in the process of making a memory. Attraction and fear arrive together. Gold leaf remains itself, yet opens another order of being to the person who encounters it. Take a step and light rises; move slightly aside and it subsides. Another time enters the act of meeting that light with a body moving now. A viewer may see the same scene repeat, but cannot return to the person who first saw it. Memory, too, needs that difference if it is to remain alive.
While the ear attends to one sound, another recedes. A different scene forms for the person who stays and for the person who walks straight through. Each work retains its own material and time while becoming a condition through which the others are perceived. The viewer’s memory also enters this composition. For someone, Dragon Horse Mountain may summon the name of another mountain. In the same space, we listen to different times. No one can decide which scene will bring someone into contact with an old time within them. That encounter also requires time in which to undergo the change happening to oneself.
This voice, too, is made of breath that has already passed.
Is it the sound of a machine, or my voice?
I call the mountain’s name again and stand beneath it once more.
That sacred mountain.
