ART LIVES TORIDE Where Art Is Born

I lived in China when I was a child. I went to a regular school, not an international school, so I didn’t understand a word of Chinese at first. I loved to draw and sing, so people came to me while I was doing what I loved. At that time, I genuinely felt the joy of expression. My expression started from a place of communication.

My art teacher in my second year of high school suggested that I go to art college. I decided to give it a try. I entered the Printmaking Department at Tama Art University, but I also made videos and did installations. Recently, I have also been writing. I don’t have a particular form of output in mind.

Themes and concepts vary from piece to piece, but what consistently appears in my work is about the weak, division, and crossing borders. I am interested in religious culture and human history. My mother is Chinese and my father is Japanese, but even after returning to Japan, I sometimes feel a kind of transparent dividing line or invisible wall. I become nervous and sensitive to every single word that people say about the relationship between China and Japan. It is as if the rancor I feel in my daily life accumulates and becomes the theme of my work.

It’s like I only move my hands 10-20% of the time, and the rest of the time I’m thinking. I don’t think there are that many works. I’m just messing around and thinking all the time. It’s like writing down the subtleties of my heart so that I don’t forget the little sadness or anger I feel when I come into contact with people. I feel as if I am making a memorandum. When I was contributing to a friend’s work based on the concept of “correspondences ,” I tried to put what came to mind on the same screen. I put about 50 completely unrelated photos on top of each other. It was really like a memo of the day.

I also often draw people. Weak people. Even if they are not socially vulnerable, people who are mentally vulnerable themselves, or people who think they are weak, too. Because I think everyone, absolutely, has a weakness. Having experienced the loss of a sense of ethnic belonging, I think I have strong empathy for people who don’t feel like they belong anywhere or who always feel alone.
This is a copperplate etching I did in college, titled “Mama”. There was a time when I lived apart from my mother. I couldn’t remember her face, so I decided to draw it. I remembered that her nose and skeleton were round. The rest of the work was composed in a meaningless way.

I am sometimes told that the works I make are somewhat scary. But in my mind, I am only depicting reality. Most of the text, drawings, and images are metaphors for reality. If I wanted to depict a mother, I could probably just look at a photograph and draw it as it is, but I wanted to filter it through the filter of my own body and mind. By doing so, a story is generated in the work. I believe that only when my point of view and the viewer’s point of view intersect with each other and create a sense of interactivity, can reality come into view.

I have many things I would like to create in the future, but I have just started thinking about doing a lithograph based on Van Gogh’s “The Grieving Old Man”. The old man looks sad, but he raises his head and grows wings. By adding to the same plate as I print, I hope to capture a single moment of movement, such as the detailed movement of a person’s mouth, or the feeling of joy when the nose swells up. Rather than simply changing from one print to the next, I have the feeling that the latent qualities of the print will overflow at any given moment.

I was born in Toride, but I moved from junior high school to junior high school and didn’t feel like I had classmates. I do have friends who are in the art field. Also, my grandmother is a Christian and goes to church, so recently I made a video about the church.
Would you like to have a cup of tea if you like? I like talking to people. Please let me know what you usually do.