Returning around 5

Artist Statement

Artist's Note One day I was crossing the river on the train. I was leaning by the window, so I could clearly feel the living scenery unfolding beyond the glass. Was it the color the evening sprinkled across the world, or did I just decide it was around that hour because the sunlight was so strong? Remembering exactly what time of day it was is harder than you'd think. Rather, that moment just rises up on its own, and even now I can sense that hour. A single color, in many faces, settling on the trembling ripples on the far side of the sky—that made me feel everything alive and breathing at the same time, together with me, who was watching it then. I want to say it was because I saw that all these dazzlingly scattering things are connected to everyone, including me. Each time I face an unfamiliar hour, I get used to it as if it were a moment I had already known. The lines I draw with a flick or a long sweep of the body race across the canvas, across the paper. And in that very moment they prove, totally and absolutely, the 'being' just as it is. My true heart can become clear inside the lines I have drawn and the layers built up. The 'I's carved into each moment naturally pass through me and beyond, calling other people to mind. So my work, unfolded as act, breathes out a wonder toward everyone who breathes alongside, and lets me dream of connection. My work, expressed in color and line, therefore touches a respect for the other. And so it touches the truth that they are no different from me. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I lift one hand and sweep it broadly through the air, drawing a line. In that moment, finding myself, who simply exists as I am, is not difficult. Even if the fading of a passing trajectory makes one doubt that anything was ever there, the act is not erased; the mark stays as it is. Perhaps this most simple and most direct act itself, more than anything else, is the most fitting proof that I am alive and present in this very moment. I trust that, through the work of drawing lines—the result of intuition, showing the inside as it is—my true heart will be expressed naturally. Through the joining of lines and the experience of layering them upon the surface again and again, I become more myself, and to say, when I face the assembly of 'I's stamped in each moment, that it is no different from myself, is therefore no exaggeration. At times I think that, beyond a proof through speech, in a more intuitive way, presence can be revealed plainly. That is to say: drawing close to the essential may, paradoxically, mean that without trying so hard to put oneself forward, the meaning of that presence may emerge more clearly when the true hearts of moments gather. And this can also be called the truth that is realized before speech, in the original place, in each moment after moment. The experience of facing oneself while working naturally lets one place the heart on others' moments as well, not only on one's own. Rather than being absorbed only in my own being, looking inward, at the same time, I cannot help but call to mind the others who exist together; and so it is no difficult thing for the weight of coexistence to lie within my work. My painting is fulfilled by drawing lines on the canvas and quietly filling the surface. In my imagination, the lines inside the picture extend and connect even beyond the picture, and the lines that return settle themselves on the canvas; rather than seeking out a point already supposed by thought, the form each line makes is, one might say, made immediately, following an intuitive response. Over a long time, in order to make a layer to be newly stacked, I have completely covered the lines on the surface with a color close to the ground and repeated this process. Recently, I have also been covering not the whole surface but parts of it, and laying new lines upon those parts to make layers; this comes from the thought that the moments revealing presence may not be meaningful only through their sequential stacking, but that the presence placed within each moment may already, in itself, hold meaning. When each moment is revealed at once on the canvas surface, it becomes natural to call to mind every being placed within it, including me, and to wish at the same time to be connected. To show myself through this work, expressed in intuitive gestures upon the canvas, in the end, touches a respect toward all other beings who exist.