article

Alpha The Wolf Circles a Cheekwood Reflecting Pool in a Racing Jacket for "Blevins Japanese Garden"

April 8, 2024, 9:00 AM CT · 3 min read

Red Panzer jacket. Stone fountains. Golden hour.

One of the earliest location sets in the catalogue, Blevins Japanese Garden is fourteen frames made across the grounds of Cheekwood Estate & Gardens in Nashville and catalogued in the spring of 2024. One look runs throughout: a red-and-white Panzer Kunst racing jacket over a black hoodie, black cargo pants with red utility straps, red high-tops and amber-tinted round glasses. The bare trees put it in late winter or early spring; the light runs from flat afternoon down into deep golden hour. (view the post)

Alpha The Wolf standing at the base of wooden garden steps beside a traditional Japanese pavilion, arms crossed and gaze downward, a bold red and white racing jacket covered in logos and patches, bare winter trees behind him.

The set moves between two kinds of garden. The pavilion and the wooden steps belong to the Blevins Japanese Garden itself; a long run of frames then works the estate's formal side - a classical white marble statue over a stone fountain pool, a rectangular reflecting pool leading to a statue on a pedestal, clipped evergreen hedges and a moss-covered stone archway. He shoots most of it from behind or in profile, the Panzer Kunst lettering reading across his back.

Cheekwood is a 1930s Georgian-style estate in west Nashville, open to the public as a botanical garden and art museum since 1960. Its Japanese garden - Shōmu-en, "pine-mist forest," designed by David Harris Engel, broken ground in 1977 and opened to the public in 1990 - was later endowed by a gift from the Blevins family, whose name it now carries, and reworked with landscape architect Sadafumi Uchiyama of the Portland Japanese Garden. Alpha booked an afternoon on the grounds - nothing more. The catalogue returns to the estate's formal side, not the Japanese garden, for a Mother's Day outing with his mom and family.

Alpha The Wolf shot from behind before a moss-covered stone archway wall in golden light, the back of his red and white Panzer Kunst racing jacket fully visible, black cargo pants with red utility straps.

Panzer Kunst is not a real label - it is the fictional martial art from the manga Battle Angel Alita, printed here on a racing jacket as a name to wear. The katakana-and-anime layer runs through the whole catalogue, the persona billed as ロンドン・イン・東京. The other Japanese garden in the archive is a different place entirely: Garden Meditation was shot at the Birmingham Botanical Gardens in Alabama, all black and face hidden. This one is red, upright, out in the open.

Alpha The Wolf shot from behind at the edge of a long garden reflecting pool, facing a classical statue on a pedestal surrounded by green hedges and bare trees under a clear blue sky.

The last stretch settles at a fountain - seated on the stone ledge with a classical statue towering over him, legs stretched out and crossed, the red jacket catching the last of the day's gold.

Alpha The Wolf seated on the stone ledge of a garden fountain with a classical statue towering above him, leaning forward with elbows on knees, the red and white racing jacket and red and white high-tops, warm afternoon light.

What "Blevins Japanese Garden" means

The name is just the location, printed plain - a specific named garden inside a bigger estate. What the shoot does with it is set a loud red racing jacket, an invented martial art across the back, against stone that was arranged to be calm: raked gravel, still pools, a statue on a plinth. The persona keeps the myth on its clothing and lets the garden stay a garden. In the wolf's telling the VOID cannot be contained; a formal garden is the opposite proposition - everything placed, clipped and held - and the wolf walks through it at golden hour anyway, matched head to toe.