These screens were produced by Okura Jiro in Virginia during the artist’s 1990 residence at the Mountain Lake Workshop, which has given its name to the title of the work. Okura created sixteen in all, each its own vertical monument recalling a glimmering cityscape. When all sixteen are set up side by side, they create the effect of a wall about one hundred and twenty feet in length. The panels are made of black walnut that has been distressed and painted with black and cinnabar red pigment, and then loosely covered over the entire surface with gold foil adhered with rabbit-skin glue. Pieces of imitation gold leaf sway with the slightest movement of air and glisten as they catch the light. It is the artist’s intention that, over time, bits of the gold leaf will fall from the screens and the wood will return to its natural state. His acceptance of the gradual transformation of his art can be taken as a metaphor for the ever-changing condition of nature stressed in Buddhism.

A video documents the making of the series, including a Shinto ceremony conducted before the trees were cut down—with permission, in the Jefferson National Forest at Little Stone Mountain in Virginia—as well as the preparation of the planks and the efforts of students and other workshop participants in gouging the boards with an adze and drilling holes into them. Okura has compared these repetitive, almost meditative activities to reading a sutra.

_{Okura Jiro. From The Mountain Lake Screen Tachi Series, 1990. Gift of the artist.}