The heart of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is its four-story Venetian courtyard around which circle palatial rooms lined with exquisite tapestries, treasures of Medieval and Renaissance art, gems of U.S. painting, and sumptuous holdings of decorative arts. Along the narrow paths of the central garden rest Grecian urns and a gently running fountain. It was here, one night in the winter of 2007, that Taro Shinoda, a guest at the Gardner’s artist-residency program, looked up into the moonlight and began to conceptualize Lunar Reflection Transmission Technique, a video installation presented in its third and most developed incarnation at the Gardner. Though the museum has been famously preserved in the state in which it appeared when Gardner passed away in 1924, curators have been able to open a few auxiliary spaces, and Shinoda transformed one of these into a silver screening room. In the center of the installation was an engawa, a low platform for observation and meditation traditionally placed in Japanese gardens. Shinoda was trained in Japanese horticulture and often integrates its forms and traditions into his art. On one wall Shinoda projected a film of the moon slowly filling the screen, interrupted periodically by night scenes of Boston, Istanbul, Limerick, and Tokyo. The film is shot in rich black and white, and as the camera carefully pans the lunar surface viewers were bathed in a pale silvery glow. In moments when the moon fills the screen or when lights from the cities are particularly bright, one almost needs to look away while at other times the room was enveloped in darkness and shadow. In the spirit of Gardner, Shinoda treated his guests to an entry into another world.

Shinoda’s experience of gazing up at a familiar moon in a foreign city jogged childhood memories of when he and his father spent two years in the United States. Away from home, he had counted on the moon to transmit his thoughts back to his mother in Tokyo. He says that as an adult he is “working on reviving my old skills of the lunar reflection transmission technique.” (Quotations are from artist statements collected and presented on Shinoda’s website and correspondence with the artist.) The retraining has been extensive. Soon after the Gardner residency, Shinoda was included in the 2007 Istanbul Biennial, curated by Hou Hanru. By this time he had built his own telescope out of cardboard and had begun filming from his studio in Tokyo. In Turkey, he filmed the moon and a new city, editing the footage for a two-channel installation. The following year Hanru invited him to the EV+A festival in Limerick, Ireland, for which he again incorporated views of and from his host city. Finally, Gardner curator Pieranna Cavalchini invited him to return to Boston to film and exhibit where the work began. Shinoda plans to continue developing the project in more locations.

The Gardner installation combined all four cities in a single-channel video. Shinoda shot the moon in a slow pan so that it fills the screen gradually from right to left. The silver room gradually changed from darkness into light and back to darkness again. When the moon is full and the sky is clear, viewers saw the lunar surface as though landing on it. Just as our imagination takes us into space, however, the video affirms our bearings on the earth by capturing a bird flying across the screen. Clouds and tree branches occasionally obscure the view, further reorienting our focus from the heavens to the earth.

After the room settles into darkness, Shinoda points the telescope to the cities, punctuating this sublime contrast between the small indicators of life on earth and the colossal form of the moon. In the cities are seen streetlights, headlights, and houselights, almost as if the stars that are invisible in the lunar scenes have come alive on the ground. As before, Shinoda edits the film to create a pattern of dark, light, and dark, this time by bringing the city slowly into focus then fading to black. Once darkened the moon returns, as viewers continue to trace a meandering path from earth to outer space, from New England to Japan.

Conceiving of the moon as a touchstone for contemplating the earth has significant precedents in Japanese art. The silver walls, Shinoda explains, referred to the fifteenth-century Silver Pavilion (Ginkaku-ji), a Buddhist temple in Kyoto. The pavilion, though never sheathed as intended, is an environment that captures lunar light to appear as a silver temple. It is accompanied by reflecting pools, a sea of sand, a moon-viewing platform (Kogetsudai), and a small waterfall called a moon-watching fountain (Sengetsu-sei). Shinoda’s installation invoked the pavilion as an example of what he senses as a profoundly lunar character to Japanese culture. In the nineteenth century, the last great ukiyo-e artist, Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, used the night sky as a premise for depicting scenes of Japanese, Chinese, and Indian myth and history in his late masterpiece One Hundred Aspects of the Moon (1885). In addition, Yoshitoshi’s use of Asian subjects and Western perspective present an earlier confluence of lunar light and global contact. Shinoda comments on his own experience in similarly broad terms: “I look at the moon and, a few hours later, you look at it in some different country. . . . Observing the way the moon travels allows me to make an image of the whole world.” The Lunar Reflection video presents fragments of this image that the viewer assembles into a vision of an interconnected earth.

Shinoda recalls that while working on Lunar Reflection he often rode his bike over asphalt and under power lines “yearn[ing] for the flowing of water and the drifting of clouds.” Clouds pass in and out of the final work in an irregular pattern; water has a more uniform presence. Shinoda set up a live audio feed from the steady flowing water in the museum’s fountain to the silver room of the installation. The cityscapes, the night sky, and their viewers were accompanied by the rhythmic sound of water falling into a small pool. In Shinoda’s installation, the drip of the Gardner fountain reverberated within the room like the moon-watching fountain that creates ripples across a reflecting pool in Kyoto. The atmosphere of the earth causes Shinoda’s lunar images to waver like a vibrating pool, which in turn provides a visual analog to the water. Sight and sound are enlisted, Shinoda explains, to produce an “abstraction of the moment” he experienced while sitting on the stone of the Gardner courtyard at midnight, looking at the reflected moonlight, and thinking of home.

It was one of Shinoda’s successes at the Gardner that the process of abstracting experience exceeded the anecdote of being alone in the museum and the nostalgia of childhood memories of home. The fountain, in fact, provided a subtle counterpart to the changing urban locations and served as another conduit to global human concerns. Shinoda has explained that his interest in water is connected to its place in Japanese religions as well as to a personal connotation. Shinoda writes: “These words ‘waterfall’ and ‘oblivion’ are always closely connected to me. And I consider [that] oblivion is the first step to generate a new notion.” The sound of water in the exhibition beckoned the viewer from the Italianate palace that is the Gardner Museum and into a silver altar dedicated to urban life and lunar light. Looking from the engawa to night visions of cities and spaces both directly outside and far away, viewers were invited to think new thoughts. Shinoda’s own meditations focus on “vibrations that happen between people,” “the sense of us all sharing this planet together,” “my people in Japan,” and “a new relationship with the earth.” Lunar Reflections offered space and time for catching the light of the moon and for contemplating the world upon which it falls.