“I looked straight up from under the tree. Some branches were close to me, some were far away, and beyond them all was the sky. There were parts I could not see or understand even if I gazed at and tried to gauge them with my own eyes.” Drawn by the “somehow unstable and mysterious space” she perceived when looking up at a tree, Hidaka eventually sought to express “the space around me, the space that surrounded me, in and of itself,” and began work on this large-scale piece. The ambitious work was completed over four winters, during which Hidaka drew trees from life, including a wild cherry on the grounds of a shrine near her home in the Tokyo suburbs. Standing in front of the painting, one experiences its unknown space as if vicariously experiencing the mysterious feeling the artist felt.