Honen-in Temple’s Zen garden sculpture from upcycled glass bottles

Artist Yukito Nishinaka has created a glass version of the traditional Japanese rock garden using recycled bottles, which is now permanently installed at Kyoto’s Honen-in Temple. The work is intended as a statement for sustainability via the reuse of resources.

Nishinaka worked with bottle maker and recycler Nihon Taisanbin Glass Bottle Mfg. Co. to upcycle the glass. The company collected and washed recycled bottles. It then melted them at 1400 degrees Celsius, and poured it into a mold.

Titled ‘Eternal Affinity,’ the artwork lines the 40-meter pathway from Honen-in Temple’s main gate to the temple gate. It consists of thick rods of olive-green glass – the tallest at 180 centimeters tall – and other smaller and horizontal glass pieces that resemble the rocks of a traditional karesansui dry garden. Moss and pebbles complete the piece.

Glass creates a new expression

The expression of the garden changes by the moment as the glass absorbs and reflects sunlight and moonlight and the colors of each season. It gives Nishinaka’s work a modern twist, even as it blends into the trees and rocks of the preexisting garden.

Honen-in Temple, which is just off the famous Philosopher’s Path, is about 340 years old and known for its simple beauty, rustic thatched-roof temple gate and white sand gardens.

Nishinaka says the concept behind his work is the connection between circulatory life and the universe. It was installed at the temple last year.

This year, it received new recognition when a film documenting its creation won a Gold Award at the WorldMediaFestivals in Germany. Also entitled ‘Eternal Affinity,’ the movie was acknowledged for showing the process of transforming used bottles into art, and for its message that both life and resources circulate and are connected, just like water and light.

Entering a place as old and steeped in natural beauty as Honen-in Temple is, automatically makes you feel the eternity of the natural world and that our own brief existence within it is conditioned on a symbiotic relationship with that. In other words, you feel the practice of sustainability as a prerequisite for our being permitted a place in this world. Nakanishi’s artwork inspires us to blend into and enhance the environment we are in, just as it does in the temple’s garden.