ART LIVES TORIDE Where Art Is Born

I am 28 years old now, and I am from Tokyo Metropolitan Craft High School studying interior design. I have made chairs and shelves. This was the trigger for me to seriously start doing art and craftsmanship.

After that, I was working at the acrylic displays company for four years. The work there was tough, but it allowed me to try out many different things. I have always wanted to go to university since then, so I quit my job, when I saved up enough money for tuition.

At first, I thought I would stay in design or product design. But when I told my friends about the mixed feelings I had for going in that direction, they told me about the Inter-media department of Tokyo University of the Arts, saying that it might be the only place to accept me with this unclarity. That’s how I came to pursue it.

Toride no Uta (2020)

By saying mixed feelings, there are so many things. One of them is my work; why do I have to work so much? Also, the value differences between my house and society. Because my father was a pastor, I feel likeI had to go back and forth between the rules of the religion I was raised in and the normal rules I have come to know in society.

Another thing is about nature and artifice. I think the gap between Tokyo and the town I grew up in when I was a child, where there was a lot of nature, was important. When it rained on my way to and from school in elementary school, I used to love going home barefoot, but I felt that Tokyo was not the place for that.

I felt that it was okay to pursue something that suited my own moral values and personality.

When I started college, I was making haiku and doing workshops. When I was working at the company, I often expressed my thoughts about society in my work. But on the contrary, through studying at Geidai, I began to see that there were other fields.

I thought I would run out of ideas quickly to create my works, but that was not the case at all.

I tried spreading marbles on the road, or putting sticks in the lake. This is a baseball field overflowing with ginkgo trees over the fence. It’s like going beyond the boundary. They overflow and proliferate. I like this kind of thing.

interference (2017)

I think I have a sense of lightly privatizing a common place, or something like that.

But I frequently think that it is not something that can be spoken on its own. There are idiomatic phrases such as “a stomach bug that won’t settle,” or “a bug’s warning.” I believe that this presence of the “bug” in that sense is the key.

Jamscape Insectcage(2021)

The work with the insect cages was a turning point. What I realized here was that I wanted to return to my childhood memories. The insect cages remind me of my childhood.

When I was a working adult, I was very conscious of the need to be strong. Even when I entered university, I wore leather shoes to school. That was how I felt. But as I spent time at the university, that feeling disappeared each time I visited my childhood memories. It was as if I was mixing children and adults.

Seeing the world with only my adult self does not feel right. I also have memories from my childhood. Cutting them off and living only with my adult self is not right for me. I want to live in the world together with my old and young self as much as possible. Using this as a guide, I am mixing the hard parts with the juvenile parts.

I wanted to do this mixing thing, and recently I came up with the study of the sandbox. Right now, I have a lot of ideas for my creation. I would like to work on them one at a time without rushing.