Taking as its motto Luc Tuymans’s remark “I picked up the paintbrush, but refused to paint”, this essay interprets the practice of the artist Chigusa Kuraishi as an “unpainted landscape”. The authors describe her calm, cold palette of horizontal colour bands in dark blue, light blue, peacock blue, green and rose red, which block the viewer’s gaze like doors or windows. Drawing on the image of the Nordic “white night”, they read her series as a metaphorical system that “closes the viewer out” yet heightens the desire to look, turning viewing into peeping and suspense. Through “blocking familiarity” and “language betrayal”, Kuraishi’s combinations of colour and words set up a tense negotiation between the visible and the invisible, the real and the illusory, delaying the pleasure of recognition. References to Lacan, Fernando Pessoa’s heteronyms and the defamiliarization of images support a reading of her landscapes as explorations of the id, of the body as a passage to other times and places, and of the loneliness and crises of modern civilization. The essay ends by asking where the landscape lies, suggesting that her works invite viewers to dissect their own habits of seeing.