It often happens that thrill of something exciting right before my eyes inspires me more than some remotely exotic places that I explore. For example, it can be a moment in which I spot two branches a tree that fell onto the asphalt in a way that they form what looks like hieroglyphic character or some kind of signal. This triggers the sensation of a silent encounter with something new yet somehow familiar, like a keyway to a different time and space that appears in the middle of the here and now.
I want to capture – through drawing and looking at the signs that have been drawn – the moments when the body’s internal memory and that of the outside world fall together on uncharted areas, like perfectly fitting pieces of an ever-transforming puzzle.
The method I have in mind is closer to “excavating” things that are hidden in the here and now, than to “depicting” personal imaginary events through the act of drawing. Therefore, I’ve been focusing as much as possible on materials and places in my direct environment. The works that come out of this are again keyholes for people – including myself – who look at them, and I hope that they will make use of these holes to peep into the new spheres that are stretching on the other side.
January 2008
contribution to the solo exhibition catalogue “NEW CAVE” published by Tokyo Metropolitan Foundation for History and Culture, Tokyo Wonder Site
I have been drawing since I was about 3. There used to be a lot of blueprints at my home because my father was an architect and I used to draw something like a moai on their reverse. I also spent a good chunk of my childhood excavating unknown things like earthenware fragments, minerals, and fossils in my neighborhood. When I was 10 years old, I saw a small photo of the Rosseta stone and read stories about deciphering the glyphs, which completely fascinated me. Then I wanted to become an archaeologist.
Although now an artist my practice, including works on paper, on panel, mural, installation, frottage, live drawing, video and so on, are reference to the new possibilities of drawing in the world today. The method I have in my mind through the act of drawing, however, is still closer to ‘excavating’ things that are hidden in here and now, than to ‘depicting’ objects/scenery/ideas in a classical way.
Archaeology was considered a collaborative work for artists and museums until the 19th century. Today, now there are the vast uninterpreted fields from our past. I can’t help thinking about the genesis of drawing which has the synchronia with the beginning of language in the human history. There are various hypotheses on it, but I think the most relevant one is the 29 lines that the upper Paleolithic people carved on common stones around 35 thousand years ago – which are thought to have been recorded the days between phases of the moon. There were 4 elements in the occurrence; the light, the transformation, the stone and the act of carving. Those carved lines might be thought of as the most primitive form of glyph or drawing – they function as the record of time past and also as the signal of the future.
Obviously, my country Japan is facing an unprecedented crisis now, and this is no longer the local concern in Japan, nor is the issue’s scope limited for the people of today. It is particularly at times like this that one starts to ask questions about the strong relationship between what we call art and humanity in a real sense. In order to do so, we should know that the moment we call ‘now’ is not a dot, independent from past and future. I believe, by the act of drawing and looking at the signs that have been drawn, we can take ‘now’ into our own perspective, because drawing has always been the intersection of direct human circumstance and the long cosmic time since its birth, and it will continue to be.
My exhibition ‘Glyphs of the Light’ at Wimbledon will consist of about 40 pieces of new drawing work and some sculptures which I am producing during this residency in London. Every work represents the intersection of my intimate relationship with phenomena taking place on my current environment at Chelsea as well as my interest in archaeology and language. Recently I have been greatly inspired by the residual images of transformation of sunbeams streaming through leaves on the road. I hope my works to be as the creative mediator – linking subtle memories of ‘signs’ and ‘phenomena’ with the future.
July 2011
contribution to “Bright6” published by The University of the Arts London
Drawing exists between pictures and language.
In fact, drawing and writing were once one and the same. Long before we began using what we now know as language, the ancients engraved the rhythms of the celestial motion into mammoth tusks, onto cave walls, and across the face of ordinary stones. This is how humans invented signs. Letters and language were developed by humans to orient themselves within a world where the unknown is constantly present. And we have managed to survive as a species by using language to better study and relate to our world. But is anyone living today capable of fully grasping new occurrences within our world’s ever-growing expanse of time and space and pointing to the future with only our existing concept of language?
My methodology interprets drawing as an alternative archaeology that corresponds to our world in the present progressive. I begin by first slipping into the world through the ubiquitous cracks that already exist and deconstructing them into dots and lines.
Take, for example, the wavering shapes of the sunlight as it filters through the trees onto the ground, the chipped white lines in the asphalt, or the curving veins of a leaf. An indecipherable mathematical formula, graffiti, veins bulging through the skin, the outlines of buildings, the topography of a rice terrace in China, the sound of footsteps echoing in an underpass, and an animal’s trail. The grooves on a record, the branches of a tropical plant, an afterimage induced by car headlights, the fictional company logo seen for a fleeting moment on a billboard in the scene of a science-fiction movie, the path of a mosquito flying through space.
I look at the dots and lines within them. I look at them from forward and behind. I trace them. Use my body. Recompose them. Produce an effect. Repeat.
In this way, I connect fragments of the deconstructed world and generate new lines, which become the circuit that connects the here and now with somewhere, some time. Neither pictures nor words can be transmitted in this circuit. Only signs can. I excavate the signs in the ever-changing present moment. My practice is to discover and acquire flickering signs of light in the faraway, in the dark and widening gap between drawing and writing.
March 2015
contribution to the solo exhibition “Signs of Faraway” at Aomori Contemporary Art Centre
Drawing Tube is a new laboratory for alternative drawing research, discourse, and practices that focuses on archiving and sharing the results.
By the word “drawing” we mean something not limited to making lines on planar surfaces, but rather the process of generating new lines or discovering invisible lines, in space and time, with all possible universal linear phenomenon as subject.
Dance might be considered making lines in space. Music might be considered making lines in time and pitch. Photography might be considered making lines with light. Text might be considered making lines in language. Whether roads on maps, constellations in the night sky, the complexity of our anatomy, our world is often first apprehended through acts of making lines.
Drawing Tube will conduct an irregular series of events, lectures, and exhibitions, with the aim of making lines, and opening connecting “tubes”, between disciplines. Additionally, through presentations of the evolving archival record, we will work to elevate the fundamental discourse about the definition of drawing, within a perpetually changing exploration of the present and future tense of relational aesthetics.
The cylindrical plastic vessels we use to carry our works on paper are also called “drawing tubes”. And in this spirit, Drawing Tube will be a moveable laboratory, unbound to any one venue, but rather a portal tube of connection potential, each time assuming different shapes, forms, and locations. Drawing Tube will be like wormholes in time and space, a transparent worm traveling the surface of a clear pond.
First we will begin by exploring the many portals in the opinions, and sensibilities of those around us. We hope to deserve your attention.
August 3, 2016
(DrawingTube.org)
I started drawing with silver at some point. Sometimes I’ve even felt like I became just another silver marker. But that’s all just part of drawing, and it brought me where I am at this point. One thing I’m sure of is that, no matter what changes of place and time, I’ll continue to live through drawing.
The important thing is to always discover the new point, and try to be activated by it. Never fall back on previous forms. This is the opposite of striving for new ideas. There is a path that led me here, and the signs are always just ahead of me on the road, like perfect-sized pebbles, mixed in with all of the trash and dog shit that’s there too. If I always try to look straight ahead or upward, I’ll miss them.
I find these signs on chilly nights, after an evening of laughing and discussing, or sharing joy and struggle with friends I respect, after our hugs and farewells, on the walk back home. I find the signs in music I haven’t heard for a while, or when I open the pages of the book that has been closed for too long.
And when I find the signs I need to restart drawing. I touch things. I smell them. I strain my ears to hear them. I find an exact point, amidst all of the cacophony of constant change around me. And I pierce the space, using the tip of the silver marker, filled with mineral powder: as the shining blade. This is the paradoxical place where everything becomes its inverse. How far can I excavate from that point, that singular moment, which eclipses life and everything else?
How vivid can I remain? Vivid about what’s happening now, right here and far away, vivid about what has happened in the past or what will someday come to be. It requires pushing the news of the day to the recesses of my spirit, yet still harvesting the pain to drive me forward. The only way to generate an alternative language, a method for newly corresponding with the world, is to just keep at it.
The point born where the tip of the marker touches the surface becomes a line with movement. It looks like a river seen from the sky above. Ripples in the water’s surface reflect the light. Nearby I can see some human-like forms. Languages are invented at the riversides, and with them new civilizations begin. For a brief moment it invokes childhood memories. Memories from before I myself learnt language. The line seeks deeper, and layers form, following the memories of an unpopulated world, of minerals, of planets, of things which have yet to happen.
The accumulated trajectories of all dots and lines reflect light, imprinting resonances into our eyes.
Maybe silver ink is a catalyst for an imaginary silver halide photography. It develops in the now, ever into the present, never remaining in the past.
November 2019
contribution to the monograph “SILVER MARKER Drawing as Excavating”
20 years ago, I drew my first signs using the veins of dead leaves that I had gathered. Ever since, the practice of creating for me has continued to be an act of excavation that serves to newly re-examine and understand the world. Tracing back further, I suppose it had started from the time I was producing music referred to as “dub,” which appropriates collected environmental sounds as a source material, and remixes it them while amplifying their reverberations.
At one point however, I realized that it was not enough to simply discover and relocate fragments of an existing world. What I needed to do was create an alternative language. In this respect, I started to engage in attempts of fabricating the very fragments of the world itself. It is an act like causing a kiss mark to exist before the kiss. The traces always come before meaning, as does reflection before substance, and negative before positive.
Like Arthur Russell’s World of Echo, a musical work created solely by traces of sounds, “dub” is a technique which implies a world that used to exist / should come.
I therefore started to use silver and other light reflective mediums that could invert things by once erasing materiality and meaning through the phenomenon of light. For instance, while one had previously peeked out at the light from the eye of a needle found on the street, now a vector is created that enables a thread of light to pass through the needle hole.
Recently, the accumulated act of drawing has gradually come to approach the act of “weaving.” The fragments of signs that are born one after another though instant improvisational gestures are twisted together, enabling a certain sense of order to emerge like a piece of woven textile. In other words, I feel that what has started is an attempt akin to writing a long text using another language.
November 2019
contribution to the exhibition “MOT Annual 2019 Echo after Echo : Summoned Voices, New Shadows” at Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo
As the pandemic broke out about a year and a half ago, we started this project called ‘Signals’.
Since then, things may have either changed or remained the same. With regard to the changes in human society, the world doesn’t seem to have changed that much. As for myself, I have been spending much more time at home with my little daughter and growing plants in my garden. The less I move around, the more I feel that my perception of the “fluctuations” happening around me has improved, if only a little bit.
Rather than going somewhere in search of a clue, I think I have become able to see hints that were already around me a little more easily than before. I have noticed various fluctuations inside human beings too. Emotions and memories are always transforming. When you tense up a muscle in one part of the body, another part of the body comes to rest, and vice versa. Energy comes and goes in the 60 trillion cells that comprise the body.
Sometimes human beings wish to tune both into the fluctuations inside themselves and the fluctuations of the outside world. And when they correspond, we may feel relieved or feel as if we have deciphered some mystery of the world.
When I was gazing at the sun shimmering through the trees on the floor, the shapes created by the light did look like some kind of new signal, and something seemed to inaugurate a broader communicational spectrum between things. I thought it was like I was in presence of letters being exchanged via light signals.
The world is never a single piece of text that has already been written but continues to be newly generated processes of correspondence. Letters are received, sent back, written again, in incessant repetition.
According to quantum mechanics, the universe is said to have begun from fluctuations. Photons, which are microscopic particles, are only substances but also waves. The world itself may be a fluctuation, and we are engaged in endless correspondence within it. We receive signals emitted from far away, and send them back.
October 2021
contribution to the Drawing Tube project “Signals”