For six months, 186 days, Tina Berning swapped her Berlin studio for the tatami room of a small machiya in Kyoto, Japan. A self-imposed sabbatical, a family adventure and a journey of inspiration through a country she fell in love with many years ago.

Staying true to her motto "A drawing a day keeps the doctor away", she bought a tear-off calendar from the stationery store next door on the day she arrived in Kyoto and filled it with her observations, notes and impressions over the following 186 days. The calendar with the tips of the day in hiragana and kanji, the positions of the moon and the Japanese public holidays forms the background noise of the drawings - sometimes covered by areas of color, sometimes exposed, sometimes surrounded by figures. The rhythm of the days of the week, the numbers and characters becomes part of her work and at the same time archives the completed time span of the six-month excursion. For the reproduction of the calendar, the artist has supplemented the drawings with a photograph taken on the exact day. We see house facades, traffic signs, plastic figures and temples and are allowed to witness the journey on a second level and also gain an insight into the artist's observational research.

For the OMIYAGE exhibition at Jaeger Art, all 186 calendar pages were shown in an expansive installation. At the same time, the first edition of the book HIMEKURI, limited to 250 signed and 250 unsigned copies, was published. The book was produced by Buch- und Offsetdruckerei Heenemann on ROUGH AIR 1.5 White-Warmwhite in the grammages 100 g/m2, 240 g/m2 and 300 g/m2.