When I was studying painting and beginning to think about my own practice, I started to question the method I had taken for granted: drawing while looking at a subject. I tried instead to paint the street corners and passing people I encountered each day after returning home, relying only on memory.
I found that I did not remember even familiar scenes well enough to reconstruct them. Knowing something is not the same as remembering it. This experience led me to use painting to trace how things are recognised and how they remain in memory.
I do not want to render a subject as a single, definitive image. I want some part of it to remain unsettled.
In Sumo, gradients soften the boundaries between contours and fields of colour. The wrestlers, seen obliquely from behind, are first recognised collectively as “sumo wrestlers”, yet at close range each figure can also be distinguished.
In Lantern, shifts, distortions and the degradation of an image through repeated copying emerge by layering the same motif. I change the method according to the subject, leaving in the picture something neither fully depicted nor conclusively stated.
After returning from a journey through Hokkaido, I lost the photographs I had taken during my stay. Because I had experienced the landscape through a camera, losing the photographs seemed to erase even the sense that I had experienced it. I felt suddenly far removed from a landscape that had once been directly before me.
To gauge that distance, I first covered a carved wooden bear, an emblem of Hokkaido, with thick paint. I later shifted the subject to dinosaur figures in order to address the question more directly. No one has seen a living dinosaur; it exists through an imagined image that we collectively share.
By repeatedly covering ready-made images with paint, I trace the distance between an experience and the image that remains within me. Although these works take sculptural form, I understand them as paintings produced through the act of applying paint.
I saw a great many statues in Rome. At first I concentrated on each one and read its caption, but as I continued looking I realised that I had begun to treat even a figure encountered for the first time as something I already knew.
For this work, I photographed two statues from several angles and combined the photographs into a single painted image.
Seeing something for the first time, becoming accustomed to it, and then overlooking it as already known: this work begins with the way my own act of seeing changes between those states.
My participation in MIND TRAIL Oku-Yamato Museum in Your Mind in Tenkawa, Nara, in 2021 led me to consider how the scenery before us is recognised as landscape. While listening to stories connected with the area, I became interested in mitate: the act of perceiving one thing as another. Through mitate, an unfamiliar “something” is recognised as a particular thing and begins to acquire meaning.
Here I saw the mountains of Tenkawa, long traversed, cherished and feared by those who lived among them. I regarded the upright trees and moss-covered fallen trunks as mountain ranges and placed several fields of colour through the forest. The gradation from green to blue and white abstractly evokes mountains, sky, and the vapour and mist rising from the forest after rain.
I continued to visit Dorogawa after Ridgeline as Seen, thinking about the vapour and mist rising from the mountains after rain. Walking there, I noticed moisture lifting from trees, moss, stones and soil, while vapour seemed to emerge from my own body in much the same way.
Through repeated conversations, I began to think that moisture in the air trembles like a wave as it touches the surface of the body—the skin—and that this sensation may be one way we recognise where we are.
In this work, contour lines indicating the mountains of Dorogawa are drawn directly onto the building’s glass as waves. “Surface” here refers not to the glass but to the surface of our bodies as they come into contact with the environment.
In Scene, I paint figures and movement as clues for apprehending a place. In Beppu in 2016, I overlaid the earlier flow of people travelling from the port towards the hot-spring district with figures I saw or encountered in the present-day city. The work approaches the place through human movement while superimposing past time upon the contemporary streetscape.
For Kaiyu Gekijo SPIRAL, held in central Oita in 2019, I responded to the festival’s structure of walking through the city to encounter artworks. The movement of people becomes a procession and gradually joins into a path. Paint close in colour to the wall, with a slight sheen, allows the figures to appear differently with the light and the viewer’s position.
The view from a vehicle, images on a screen and people passing by are among the “passing scenes” repeatedly encountered in everyday life.
Images follow one another as if scrolling. They may appear repetitive, yet each arrives as a different event. They move on without forming a strong relation to us, passing without remaining deeply in the body.
This work attends to that state of perception without full involvement.