How a Japanese Card Game Inspired Will Matsuda’s Pictures of the Pacific Northwest

Will Matsuda grew up in Oregon, a state famed for its environmental extremes—dense forest, volcanoes, desert, and Crater Lake, the deepest such body in the United States. Matsuda began to be interested in making images about place when he left home for college and experienced a longing for visual materials that reflect the complexity of the American landscape, with its ambivalent histories of theft, loss, and reinvention.

As Susuki #2, an image from his series Hanafuda (2020–21), reveals, Matsuda works with a distinct vocabulary, seeming to construct his photographs piece by piece, using simple tools such as on-camera flash to create resonant, nearly aphoristic effects. Similar to vanitas paintings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Matsuda’s pictures manipulate elements of the natural world in order to comment on the ultimate artificiality and fleetingness of human mastery. Susuki #2, for example, might ask that we question our overly celebratory, frequently acquisitive, Instagram-abetted relationship to images. The hand of the mirror holder, who would appear to have successfully captured the face of the moon and its delicate maria, has, ironically, begun to fade away.

But the vanitas connection is merely one reading. Hanafuda, or “flower cards,” are a Japanese style of playing card developed from Portuguese decks that entered the Asian nation in the seventeenth century. These cards were banned by the Japanese government and then constantly redesigned and recirculated by enterprising gamblers to circumvent the rulings. Matsuda encountered modern-day hanafuda during New Year’s gatherings in Hawaii with extended family. His paternal grandmother, Amy Matsuda, encouraged him to play. The cards are organized into twelve suits corresponding to the twelve months of the year; their imagery is simple—landscapes, flora, and fauna printed primarily in black, red, and white—yet striking, memorable.

Matsuda’s work in this series is, in part, derived from hanafuda illustrations. He sometimes titles the photographs after the plants that correspond to the suits—susuki (grass), kiku (chrysanthemum), ume (plum blossom)—or after special cards that bear figures, such as the phoenix. Yet the cards’ calendrical structure does not absolutely determine the content of Matsuda’s images, which are rather loosely inspired by memories of time spent with family and questions related to place. As he explains, the Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock tradition has also been a primary influence. Matsuda is drawn to the stylized flatness of ukiyo-e (literally, “floating-world pictures”) as well as the virtuosic manipulation of colored ink seen in these patently commercial images, which became popular in urban centers during the Edo period. The term uki (浮) refers to a “floating” lifestyle of consumerist hedonism that grew up in the context of sumptuary laws that prevented wealthy nonaristocratic city dwellers from purchasing some items, including but not limited to land.

According to the photographer Ricardo Nagaoka, a friend of Matsuda’s who is depicted in Ricardo (2021), even Matsuda’s portraits “feel connected to the landscape”—human figures seem intimately mingled with, rather than set above or against, natural elements. Given present-day environmental disasters, along with housing shortages and astronomical real-estate prices in the United States and beyond, Matsuda’s hanafuda are a reminder that, although we may all be experiencing a certain floating feeling, it is possible to come back down to Earth. Just follow the stark and strangely joyful outline of a chicken held aloft, for example. Viewed in a particular light, it is, in fact, a phoenix being reborn.

This piece originally appeared in Aperture, issue 246, “Celebrations,” under the title “Hanafuda.”