Tajiri from far away - Hundertwasser, Kaurinui valley, New Zealand 1999.

It was in Paris at rue d'Odessa, next to the Gare Montparnasse, where i went to see Tajiri's studio, like visiting a holy shrine.

I went often to see him and his work, some finished some in the making.

In alabaster and iron, formed with gypsum of Paris or welded with hissing sparkling flames.

And Shinkichi Tajiri was there like a surgeon performing an operation, like a deep see miner with eye-protecting goggles, or, more precisely, like a priest whom you can trust because he has insights you do not have, performing his duty, his rites, which you do not quite but which you know are beautiful and right and just.

I was 23, Tajiri was 5 years older, I was very impressed, just discovering Paris, witnessing the post-war free development of the incredible flowering in the arts.

I wanted to be part of the dawning of this new phantastic paradise like Tajiri and Brô.

Since then i came across many three-dimensional human artifacts, but nothing could equal Tajiri or satisfy my preprogrammed subjective eyes once you have seen Tajiri in 1951 and you applied Tajiri's realm as a measure for sculptural poetic expression.

Tajiri's art has the power of magic, the impact of trees and the divine creative order.

The Tajiris just take off, everything fits.

Tajiri gives proof that without beauty nothing works because the supreme function is beauty.

Of course, it is also the Japanese discipline, so exotic and so unreachable, the same rigor of cosmic duties like one encounters in Hokusai.

The same self-imposed unbreachable laws like the perfect know-how of the branching of the trees.

If man can reach the same quality of creation as nature always does, taking it for granted.

Tajiri reached this state in his studio, 9 rue d'Odessa in 1951.

Nobody was there to witness, as often happens when great things are born.

Maybe even Tajiri did not realize the miracles he was creating.

It is difficult to describe the multitude of gracile bodies and delicate, strong creatures standing in absolute perfection, transparent like dragonfly-warriors in his high domed studio with light from above.

It was like entering another time, another world, another age, another's dream, encountering parallel worlds.

Howard Carter must have had a similar impression when he first stepped into the secret chamber of Tutankhamun.

It is one of the deepest regrets of my life that i did not have a camera to make photos.

Just imagine stepping out of the Gare Montparnasse, the busiest place of Paris, into the calm realm of freshly created quiet gods and creatures.

And the perfect gods and perfect creatures had a skin of the purest white and a skeleton of the darkest black.

It is the quiet beauty which functions and which is invincible and which gives hope to the world for a better, and just, the supreme order.

Where the creativity of man and the creativity of nature will be reunited.

I do not know how I came to know Shinkichi Tajiri.

We exchanged works which we still have.

This is tangible proof that we really met.

Friedensreich Hundertwasser