The newly reconstructed Hatoya Hot Spring Zuihōkaku Hotel reopened in 2014 and features Ki-Yan’s work in the large bath of the onsen (hot springs) on the top floor. Filled with water collected from 910 meters below ground, the onsen offers you an opportunity to relax while gazing upon Ki-Yan’s lucky motifs of bottle gourds, nanten (nandin) and unkin (sakura cherry blossoms and Japanese maple leaves). To create this unusual piece of art, Team Ki-Yan travelled to Shigaraki in Shiga prefecture and used a special technique to paint these lucky motifs on 60cm on 4 sides ceramic plates. While at Hatoya you can find another piece of Ki-Yan’s work: a wall painted with 1220 doves, Initially a temporary wall put up around construction work, the piece was eventually moved to Hatoya’s roof garden for permanent display.
Located near Kyoto’s Maruyama Park, Chōrakukan’s Italian restaurant Coral, is a popular and trendy venue for ‘restaurant weddings’. With 650 ‘Love Doves’ flying across the walls and ceiling, the restaurant provides a stylish and romantic setting for weddings. The impressive large-scale mural painting was completed in a very short time with the help of Ki-Yan’s friends-before the founding of Team Ki-Yan. So while some of the doves are not perfect, they are still charming! To commemorate Chōrakukan’s 100th anniversary, in 2008 Ki-Yan painted gorgeous peacocks in the passage between the old and new buildings to bring fortune to newlywed couples.
Have you seen Ki-Yan’s ‘Flying Elephants’ on Kyoto’s famous Sanjō Shōtengai shopping street? If so, there is no surprise that the tantan noodle shop intrigues every passer-by, offering not-too-spicy tantan noodles topped with plenty of fresh vegetables. The shop’s unique name ‘Piito’ originates from Pete Lattimer, the hero of the owner’ s favourite U.S. TV drama Warehouse 13′. The ten elephants are the result of a play on words of the two Chinese characters used for the shop’s name which can be read as ‘ten animals’ when inverted. Additionally, the elephants are facing the direction of northwest as a symbol of luck. As Ki-Yan painted the elephant motifs on both sides of the large shop window, you can enjoy the artwork from inside as well!
NOUVELLE VAGUE is a Kyoto café restaurant, which celebrates its signature dish of Tarte Tatin. Spending his university days dining and eventually working at a restaurant in Kyoto, the owner of NOUVELLE VAGUE, Mr Nobuyuki Maeba, decided to open his own culinary business upon the closing of the restaurant. Inspired by his previous workplace, the Tarte Tatin is NOUVELLE VAGUE’s most impressive dish. Following the original recipe, it takes Mr Maeba 10 hours to transform 4-5 apples into one 15 cm round tart. Fuji apples are used in both the tarts and the artwork-Ki-Yan travelled all the way to Nagano Prefecture to make the sketches for this piece. You can spot Ki-Yan’s apples painted on the big industrial fridge in the La Village branch of NOUVELLE VAGUE.
Ki-Yan painted ‘The Praise of Barleycorn’ at Katsukura’ s Higashinotōin branch in 2005. The barley motif, a symbol of fertility, comes from the signature style of Katsukura’s rice-cooked with barley and served with crispy mains such as tonkatsu (breaded pork cutlets), õebikatsu (prawn cutlets) and yubakatsu (tofu-skinned cutlets). Ki-Yan’s mural painting was commissioned for the restaurant’s reopening and completed in an extremely short time, just before the Gion Festival. Even members of Katsukura’ s head office’s design department needed to work through the night to complete the project on time. One of them, the Nihonga artist Shūjirō Takeda, eventually became a member of Team Ki-Yan.