Standing midstream in a creek that runs through the Whitman College campus, three colorful gates come as something of a surprise. Technically, the gates are neither entrance nor exit; only the creekwater passes through at their feet. But the seven-foot-tall structures — flat arches whose embedded glass panels glow like an apparition when the sun hits — suggest a transcendent corridor.
These are the Topophilia Gates (1999) by artist Keiko Hara. An art professor at Whitman from 1985 to 2006, Hara took inspiration for this piece from temple gates in Japan. Traditionally, such gates symbolize the transition from the ordinary world to the sacred. Hara says, similarly, the water running through her installation represents the passage from one realm into another.
Hara knows a lot about moving from one realm to another, both in terms of her own history and her lifelong pursuit of artistic expression.
She was born in 1942 to Japanese parents in what’s now North Korea, where her father worked for a Japanese company. The tumultuous World War II years were complicated further when her father was captured by Chinese forces and imprisoned for eight years. In 1945 Hara’s mother moved her children to the Yamaguchi prefecture in Japan. There, Hara found solace in the sea.
“I always enjoyed collecting shells,” she recalls. “I loved to walk along the ocean, finding all the strange, amazing, beautiful shells and seaweed.” She discerned patterns and meaning in the natural detritus that washed up, sparking a lifelong fascination with nature’s mystery and expansive landscapes.
An early artistic interest led Hara to the Gendai Art School in Tokyo, then Oita-Kenritsu Art College in Oita, Japan. By 1971, she longed to further her contemporary art studies in the U.S. The question was, how would she pay for the move across the Pacific Ocean?
At the time she was somewhat obsessed with a local volcano. “It was a beautiful volcano,” she says, “very active.” She could see it from her apartment and witness puffs of smoke. Hara painted the volcano over and over, always abstractly. (“My volcano was not very realistic,” she says.) This made it difficult to convince anyone to give her work a showing. One gallerist suggested she make the image look “more like a postcard.”
Her lucky break came when another artist had to drop out of a show, and the gallery needed to fill the space. “It was amazing,” Hara recalls. “People really liked this volcano … really thought my work is very new, very different. I sold out the whole show and I paid off all my debt for my paints, and I had very good money to come to America.”
She landed at Mississippi State University for Women in Columbus, Miss., where she earned a BFA in painting. Her burgeoning interest in printmaking drew her next to the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, where she earned an MFA in printmaking, and soon added another MFA at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Mich.
With an armful of art degrees, Hara sought a new teaching position and found one she thought was in Washington, D.C. When she realized Whitman College was in the middle of Washington state, she was crestfallen. But a friend urged her to give Walla Walla a try.
In 1985, Hara arrived in the small Eastern Washington town and saw the rolling hills of the Palouse. It was love at first sight. She was and remains astonished by what she calls the “360-degree sky” and the green and gold wheat fields rolling in from the distance like waves. Though landlocked, the landscape seemed oceanic to Hara, reminding her of views in Japan. “Instead of going to the beach,” she suggests with a laugh, “just drive through the wheat fields.”
She also sensed something right away: “I can make big paintings here.” Hara has been doing so ever since.
Born during World War II, Hara now spends the bulk of her time at a former WWII military base: the decommissioned Walla Walla Army Air Base, which trained bomber crews for the war effort starting in 1942. While the bulk of the site is now the Walla Walla Regional Airport, the barracks and bunkers have also been repurposed — in Hara’s case, as an art studio and storage unit.
She stacks some of her vast catalogue in an ammunitions bunker, on the wall of which is a large white sign with red-stenciled letters listing “Maximum Explosives” limits for the space:
WARHEAD – 8 EA
or
ROCKET MOTORS – 24 EA
or
ROCKET IGNITERS — 800 EA
It’s a haunting specter of war, perhaps particularly for a Japanese immigrant. But Hara doesn’t dwell on the history. She’s focused on how perfect the conditions are for preserving paintings and prints. Buried in the earth, the bunker is cool and dark inside. (Local wineries have taken over neighboring bunkers for the same reason.) She had special shelves built to store her work vertically under the curved metal roof.
“It’s great!” Hara exclaims, cold air gushing out as she swings open the imposing metal door. “Instead of weapons … all the art!” Her only complaint: “I wish I had a bigger bunker.”
Nearby, Hara works daily in the painting studio she’s occupied since 1985. A former barrack, the bright, windowed space sits in a flat field near the airport. “It used to be just me and the wild rabbits,” she recalls of her arrival. Forty years later, coffee shops, wineries and whiskey distilleries have sprouted across the field.
“My day doesn’t start without going to the studio,” Hara says. “I cannot wait to go every morning.” On arrival, she swings open a large and many-paned window she salvaged and repurposed as a door to accommodate her large paintings. All around her are the tools of her trade: jars and cans of oil paints in all colors; buckets of well-worn paint brushes; works completed and in-progress all around.
Some paintings look like storm clouds, others lily pads, others too abstract to pin down beyond a feeling. The only figurative work visible in Hara’s studio is a sweet painting of her daughter as a youngster, playing violin. The girl is clear at the center — green shirt, black pants, brown violin — but begins to blur at the edges, like a memory.
After a contemplative visual assessment of what she wants to work on, Hara dives in with gusto, pouring out and mixing paints on an industrial glass table at the center of the space.
“Topophilia” means love of place. In addition to being included in the titles of many of Hara’s vibrant works, the word serves as a key to unlock her perspective and approach. For her, place refers to both the connection she feels with natural landscapes, as well as to something more interior and hard to define.
“We all have a special place inside of us — that no one can take from us,” Hara says. “It gives you energy and life, like spring.” The trick she tries to perform is translating that interior state into outward expressions via large-scale paintings, prints and installations. “If I have a moving experience, something I care about,” she explains, “I try to reach inside, so the viewer can experience that feeling too.”
It sounds a lot like writing poetry and the result is similar: abstract imagery that connects with other people and reveals more layers the longer you look. Vivid bursts of color and repeating shapes may not read “landscape” at first, but take a moment to marinate and you start to feel something pulling you closer.
Her use of color is instinctual, almost synesthetic. She has a hue in mind, applies it, then steps back to consider, applies more, steps back — always reaching for that moment when the image matches an emotional reaction held within, whether in response to a storm or the death of a friend.
“My work is not just on the exterior,” Hara says. “It’s more like beyond reality … to be able to give a sense of place where we really have amazing energy and love.”
Working at a large scale helps facilitate the sense of immersion (Hara often employs a ladder to reach the upper parts of a painting). All the better to blur your own edges and sink into her visions: layers of sea blues, white polka-dot moons and juddering slashes that suggest a horizontal rain. Are you sliding into a lake? Floating in space? Walking on the sky?
In this sense even her 2D works are portals of sorts, ushering viewers into new ways of seeing.
This past June, Hara won Artist Trust’s prestigious Twining Humber Award. The unrestricted grant of $10,000 is given annually to a female Washington state visual artist over age 60 who has been making art for at least 25 years.
Hara was thrilled by the news, and knew exactly what she’d put the money toward: “This grant will make it possible to work on a new set of twelve large scale mokuhanga I have been planning for quite some time,” she wrote in a statement. “It would not be possible to create these prints without the use of large, high quality, handmade washi [rice paper] from Japan.”
Mokuhanga (a style of Japanese woodblock print) is yet one more of Hara’s passions, which she works on in another creative studio across town: the Mokuhanga Project Space. She founded it in 2016 when a collector couple offered their three-car garage. It’s where she works on her carved woodblock prints — which float and drip with watery motion — as well as hosts artist residencies, print workshops and exhibits.
Now in her 80s, Hara’s enthusiasm for artmaking remains bottomless, as does her love of this place where she has lived and worked for 40 years. “I’ve spent time in New York City,” she adds with a smile, “and Walla Walla is still the best place to be.”
Correction: The video narration for this episode contains an error, stating that Hara was born in Japan. We regret the mistake and are working to fix it.
Catch up with the artists featured in the first season of Art by Northwest, and watch for new Season 2 episodes as they roll out in August, September and October, 2025.
Brangien Davis
