A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai) is one of Jeff Wall’s earliest digital montages. It refers directly to a woodblock print by famous Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai. Wall transposes the nineteenth-century Japanese scene to a contemporary cranberry farm near Vancouver. Amateur actors play the odd assortment of rural and city characters, surprised by the forces of nature. It required over 100 photographs, taken over the course of more than a year, to achieve a seamless montage that gives the illusion of capturing a real moment in time.
This, like many of the scenes in Wall’s works, was staged. The ‘sudden gust’ was produced by a wind machine, the hat was tied to a stick with nylon thread and moved through the air, and the two trees, which had been felled elsewhere, were pulled on thin ropes.
“When I was making A Sudden Gust Of Wind, I knew I wanted to show how the air would carry the papers. Hokusai had already solved some of those problems. If you analyze his composition, you realize that many of the little pieces of paper coincided with very important points on the rectangle. He composted something that had a feel of the accidental. It was not accidental, but he knew how to make it look that way. I thought that the only way to achieve that was to first create chance situations, to create a lot of movement and then just have a lot of material to edit. So we created a way a lot of paper could be moved in the air and then tried to think of both the rectangle and the invisible air current in three dimensions. As the papers move in depth, they move away from us and get smaller. I just worked hard on it and tried to compose. There is no guide, it’s just a feeling, a sense of the real, how things really are or would be.”
