There are two main motifs in my paintings.
One is that which captures existence through the five senses, including sight.
The other is one that supposedly existed in the past.
Unlike the usual process of a painter who draws a sketch or an esquisse and then moves on to the actual painting, I create a three-dimensional object before I paint, using objects that are close to me. I treat them as the origin/source of images for constructing paintings, and from these I develop fragmentary images.
And not only that, I also incorporate historical objects, heritage, ruins, and folklore that I cannot perceive with my five senses, in other words, things that are said to have existed in the past but cannot be captured in their entirety today, as fragmentary information at various times.
By using a shaped canvas to express these two "fragmentary" qualities, the artist reminds the viewer that the work is a "cut-out fragmented figure. By intentionally creating these missing or undrawn interstices, I make the viewer imagine "what is in between" and "what was drawn in the undrawn areas.
This act of encouraging the viewer to imagine connects "what exists" and "what does not exist" and indicates the boundary between them, and I believe my work serves as a device for this purpose.
【About the "Yobitsugi" series】
In recent years, he has been developing the "Yobitsugi" series of paintings that look like separate paintings pieced together.
"Yobitsugi" is one of the techniques of "Kintsugi," a process of repairing chipped pottery or lacquer ware with gold, in which the missing part of a vessel is filled with a piece of another vessel and repaired with gold to make a new vessel.
While the so-called "Kintsugi" is a form of repair and has a strong meaning of "healing" a vessel that is still alive, I feel that "Yobitsugi" is a ritual to "revive" a vessel that has been dismembered and died.
Just as each fragment of a vessel has its own story to tell, I hope that the spliced paintings will remind us of the invisible existence that continues outside of each fragment.