Mud is known to be a simple material: perfect for pottery, luxurious mud baths, building designer-worthy buildings, and even for creating low-tech air conditioners to cool yourself down.
But it’s not often that we see mud being used in a more artistic, free-flowing way, as Japanese artist Yusuke Asai has been doing for over the last decade. Best known for his sprawling murals adorning walls from India to the United States, the Tokyo-born painter uses local soil as a painting medium, much like how a conventional painter might use watercolors or acrylic paints from a tube.
One of Asai’s recent works is this incredible mural done for the Wulong Lanba Art Festival in Chongqing, China. Rising up from ground level and up to more than two stories high into a dome, the impressive work is titled “The earth is falling from the sky” and features a mythical-looking female figure with her arms outstretched.
Upon closer examination, we see that the walls are festooned with various organic forms, some resembling imaginary animals and plants, while other shapes and lines are more fluidly tribal or geometric in nature, creating the impression of a blank wall that has suddenly come alive.
Asai, who is a self-taught artist, often uses the soil found right at the local site for his painting technique, typically mixing the soils with varying amounts of water, as soils differ in their color, texture, particle size, viscosity, and composition, depending on the location, climate, and terrain. Thanks to this site-specific technique, Asai is able to get a wide array of different tones for his murals—from deep browns, burnt oranges, brazen reds, to neutral beiges.
Asai’s first use of soil as a material dates back to 2008, when he took part in a group exhibition in Indonesia, creating a mural with water and soil found on site. He instantly took to the technique, as it’s a humble, readily available one that doesn’t require any specialized supplies to prepare.
Asai has since experimented with making art and other different installations with other non-conventional mediums like dust, flour, masking tape, pens, and in one case, even animal blood—all of them exhibiting that same predilection for a somewhat tribal-primitive aesthetic.
Filled with swirling forms that seem to nest in and sprout from each other, much of his soil-based work seems to suggest a kind of “universal ecosystem” that is not only depicted as an image but resides in the soil medium itself. Asai’s work seems to be saying, “Soil is alive!”
Asai’s preference for simple materials goes back to his childhood when he would “paint” with his food, or even now when he “paints” with soy sauce at Japanese pubs. He explains this artistic tendency:
Asai’s work is often temporary in nature and is only installed for a limited period of time. But in challenging our views on how soil can be used, and interacted with, Asai is suggesting that we open our minds to the vastness of what soil can be, and also what art can mean:
To see more, visit Yusuke Asai’s Instagram, as well as Anomaly and Anomaly’s Instagram.
