the unknown world: infernal figures

Short summary of ‘Infernal Figures’, by Ryunosuke Akutagawa:
The daughter of Yoshihidé, a great painter of great renown with a very haughty character, beautiful and young, is welcomed into the home of the Lord of Horikawa, who is of great kindness and to whom the people pay particular respect. Her father wanted her to return to their home, but the Lord refused; instead, he commissioned her to paint a picture, The Screen of Infernal Figures. He asked her to depict the Hell and its vices. So, when he was making this screen, he often asked his apprentices to pose for him so that he could reproduce them in his painting, as Yoshihidé needed to see things before painting them. However, the models and apprentices he used were abused and even died, because what he did to them was so cruel. Above all, he did not mind sacrificing his daughter for his art. Finally, after the screen had been handed over, the painter committed suicide, and the exercise was interpreted as a punishment from the Lord. Hell is him, Yoshihidé, with his pride and obsessive carelessness. For me, this is a representation of humanity's crime, that of existing.
     The artistic work provided takes up this story, which came into my life and was read at the same time as we came into contact with Giuseppe, the manager of the new Japanese grocery shop Mogu in Neuchâtel, who offered me the chance to exhibit a work. It also turns out that I was in the middle of a period of discovering Japanese novelists, reinterpreting the main elements of The Screen of Infernal Figures through the codes of The Unknown World. Then you can decide to delve deeper into the elements used, to eventually observe that humans in themselves constitute a sin by their mere existence, they can quite easily spoil the lives of others as well as spoil their own lives in full awareness of their actions.