At Sol, one part of the wall is painted in magenta. This color, discovered by Goethe, is a combination of red and violet, which respectively are the lowest and highest colors of the visible spectrum. Red is most heavy with long wavelengths signifying Roughness. Violet is light with short wavelengths signifying Delicateness. Hence, in Japan, violet is commonly used to represent the highest rank. The words, “reason is formed by the height of culture and the height of animality” represent this ideology; when the extremities of the vulgar and the refined exist, instead of combining both and diving it in half, it is the intuition of going both directions simultaneously. This is what is referred to as the Middle Way in Buddhism, meaning when exact opposites exist, one does not take what is in the center but encloses them both. Sol’s aim to synthesize the man-made, contemporary and western, with the natural, antique and eastern, alludes to the meaning of the color magenta, which signifies a mixture of opposite colors. Thus, magenta is the symbol of the Middle Way.

Sol KYOTO

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