Meeting surrealism: An obsession with Escher then and now

I was introduced to the artist MC Escher when I was 10 years old — in a Japanese theme park modeled after Dutch living called Huis Ten Bosch.

And what a strange place Huis Ten Bosch was. This theme park was constructed with architecture from the Netherlands — windmills, canals, clogs, and multicolored tulips adorned its perfectly manicured streets to repurpose an idyllic image of the European country.

The park opened in 1992 on Japan’s Hairo Island. Fireworks hit the sky every night at Huis Ten Bosch.

The memories of this park and the MC Escher museum inside it are as blurry and dream-like as the movement of surrealism itself encourages. It’s probably fitting to remember an artist like this so known for his whimsical work.

MC Escher, a 19th-to-20th century surrealist artist and mathematical genius, was born in the city of Leeuwarden in the Netherlands in 1898. His adolescence bloomed into adulthood just as the Dada era transformed into the Surrealist cultural movement of the early 1920’s.

I remember getting to know Escher in the theme park museum like many others do — examining his most popular pieces Hand with Reflecting Sphere (1935), Two Birds (1938), Drawing Hands (1938), and of course Relativity (1953).

Escher liked to play with the impossibilities of reality. In Relativity, stairs are connected in a way that leads to nowhere, and yet the scene looks perfectly functional. Hands on a two-dimensional piece of paper draw themselves, and patterns of animals move in a way where their white space in turn creates themselves in opposites.

Every piece of art mentioned above looks like it makes sense upon introduction but on closer inspection makes no sense at all. And right there is the heart of where my passion for surrealism began.

Andre Breton, the “father of Surrealism”, was a writer and poet born in 1896 in France. With his implementation of automatic writing and creation of The Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, Breton gained notoriety and a gang of surrealist artists to follow him. He is quoted as saying, “Nothing that surrounds me is object, all is subject.”

The surreal aspects of life may be that you see the world in one way and I see it in another. If surrealism is subjectivity, perhaps we are all living in a separate sense of surrealism — your world is surreal to me and mine is surreal to yours.

But the fantastical thinking of surrealist art and mindset can be much bigger, much grander. Like a dream, the world can look like it makes sense and that it is operating on an objective plane of understanding — but upon waking up you realize it was just a mess of realities.

A mess of realities is not unlike having a Dutch-influenced theme park in the middle of an island in Japan. In that surreal reality I met Escher, the inspiration for all of my great loves: the bizarre and the absurd.