Wagyu Fuji

Wagyū / 和牛 — contemporary minimalist print, black and white. The office, on the wall beside the desk.

Two kanji over the outline of Mount Fuji, in black and white. The characters read 和牛 — wagyū, literally “Japanese cow”, the word the rest of the world knows as a kind of beef.

The joke underneath it

It hangs in the office, beside the desk, and it is there for the joke underneath it. Wagyū is famous as a luxury product, but the thing being sold is not the meat, it is the process: years of breeding, feeding and attention, done the same way every day. It is a word about patience that most people read as a word about indulgence.

Mount Fuji sits under it doing the same work from the other direction. There is a Japanese line that a man who climbs Fuji once is wise and a man who climbs it twice is a fool, which is either a joke about effort or a warning about it, depending on the day you read it. Either reading works in a room where people go to do difficult things.

Why the office

Visually it is an exercise in restraint: two weights of black, a hard horizon, and faint radial lines behind — a fan, a sunburst, or a contour map, depending on how long you look at it. It was chosen for the office because a working room needs one thing on the wall that rewards a long stare and asks for nothing back, and because anything with people in it would have been a distraction at eye level.

It is the driest picture in the collection. The Slim Aarons in the dining area is about leisure, the Sgt. Pepper’s gatefold is about company, and the Pink Floyd prism above the bed is about the end of the day. This one is about the middle of a Tuesday.