About the Exhibition

- How a plants’ flower blooms from a deer's head and a landscape appears ‐

It was a single line in the beginning. The stumble of a pen, a brush stroke, a drip, or asmudge on the surface of the paper, “image/shape” is created by accepting these accidental phenomena without rejecting them.

The traces of lines can be seen in butterflies, landscapes, trees, rivers, mineral patterns, and so on, which are linked together to form the components of a new “image” or story. Unknown “images” have symbolic meanings, like a crossroads of foreshadowing lines, where a multilayered world can be seen at any scale from a micro- and macro-viewpoint.

It is a fun experience to encounter them like looking at an uncontrollable life form. The fractal structure of the “blood vessels,” with its branching lines, can also be seen in “branches,” “rivers,” “veins,” “wings,” “roots,” and “horns,” and to me, it is the “form of life. The deer's antlers become the stems of water-carrying plants, which in turn become the veins of leaves and the landscape in the painting. Word play and palindromes are based on the sound “kami,” which evokes various images such as paper (kami), god(kami), hair (kami), top(kami), guard (kami), and bite(kami) in Japanese.

“Ah! ” is surprise, “Ah” is recognition and demand, and “AME” makes us think of candy (AME), rain (AME), heaven (AME). Each syllable of the Japanese syllabary, and even more images are created by combining these syllables.

Just as each word is infused with a new spirit, each painting is made up of individual images, their compositions and relationships, and I feel that each one has a life of its own.

Just like the concept of animism is “Spirits reside in all thing like all plants and trees”. And perhaps I, too, am playing with the visual chain of lines and forms.

Therefore a butterfly becomes a butterfly, a bird becomes a bird, A painting becomes itself.