Fondation Cartier invited the artist Sho Shibuya to produce a special work to welcome the visitors. The artist has created a series of fifty paintings during a thirty-five-day journey through the Japanese islands, fulfilling a longstanding dream to render homage to Hiroshige and his Fifty-Three Stations of the Tōkaidō (東海道五十三次之内, Tōkaidō Gojūsan-tsugi no uchi, 1832). Beginning his pilgrimage in Nihonbashi in the footsteps of the great Ukiyo-e master, Shibuya, instead of going from Tokyo to Kyoto like his illustrious predecessor, visited the forty-seven prefectures of Japan. Each day he painted a view of the sky on the front page of a local newspaper. From Okinawa to Hokkaido by way of Kyushu and the different regions of Honshu, from blue skies to blazing dawns, a poetic cartography takes form echoing a vision of time passing to the rhythm of the dailies, whose first pages, the verso of the celestial mosaic, count out the days.
