Joanna Karpowicz's 2022 painting merges Japanese folklore with Ancient Egypt's god of death: Foxes’ Wedding I (Anubis Meets Yōkai), acrylic on canvas. @jkarpowicz_art
Polish painter and comic book artist Joanna Karpowicz has been bringing Anubis, Ancient Egypt's jackal-headed god of death, to her canvases since 2012. But her Anubis isn't found in temples; he's an everyday figure lingering in cafes, on the streets, or sometimes just standing outside a convenience store..
What brings these two figures together isn't just their canine heads, but the fact that they're both entities residing 'in between.' Anubis is a psychopomp-a transitional companion who guides souls between two worlds.Yōkai,meanwhile, are liminal beings in Japanese folklore, dwelling on the outskirts of cities, on hills between villages, on bridges, and at thresholds.
Karpowicz's painting unites these two guardians of the threshold in the same winter forest.
The scene in the artwork opens the door to tales of Kitsune no Yomeiri, or the 'fox's wedding.'In many regions of Japan, this phrase describes both a sunshower and the kitsune-bi (foxfire) lights that look like the lanterns of a distant wedding procession in the mountains at night.
According to popular belief, foxes conceal their weddings from human eyes by taking refuge in the peculiar tricks of rain and light. Karpowicz has transposed this motif onto a tranquil, snow-covered forest path.
In a folktale from the Miyazaki region, a man walking through the forest gets caught in a light sunshower. 'There's a fox's wedding,' he thinks. He begins to follow a beautiful woman walking just ahead of him, who occasionally turns back to smile at him.
The woman enters a grove; as she breaks off twigs and puts them in her hair, they transform into ornamental hairpins. Upon touching a large tree and circling its trunk, she's suddenly adorned in a gorgeous bridal gown. The man realizes she's no ordinary woman, but a fox in disguise.
As the woman approaches a bamboo grove, fox-faced figures emerge. Carrying long chests and a palanquin, the procession lines up beside the bride, and soon after, a wedding feast and celebration begin in a large, thatched-roof house. To watch the ceremony, the man finds a hole in a wall, steps up onto what he assumes to be a stone stair, and lights his pipe.
After a few puffs from his pipe, the illusion dissolves: the thatched-roof house vanishes, replaced by a shrine; what he thought was a stone step is actually the base of a large stone lantern; and the hole in the wall is merely the lantern's circular opening.
To hide their weddings from humans, foxes first draw a curtain of rain; if that fails, they use magic to cast an illusion over the observer's eyes.
In reality, the man was peering through the hole of a stone lantern in a desolate shrine - and the magnificent wedding he witnessed was nothing but a grand deception conjured by the foxes.