Between a Landscape and a Landscape Painting, Visual sensory and physical sensory
Through the accumulated time in Japan, Japanese has experienced the lost in the war, the economic miracle, the bubble economy, its collapse, disaster by earthquakes, depopulation, consumerism, stagnation of the development. It seems to me that personal incidents and familiar issues, for instance conflicts among people and difficulty of our living, are all affected by these social conditions. I think that a large number of people are feeling fatigued, a sense of stagnation and sentiment about our contemporary society. I strongly feel that this society is very difficult for younger generations to make their own livings.
Through my perspective as a woman, I would like to examine how we can overcome these issues and how we can get along with them. In the fields of history, including culture and arts, they have been a man-dominating world, though our society doesn’t exist without women, the roles of male and female are becoming more complex. Moreover, I think it is quite difficult particularly for women to achieve both social and domestic roles at the same time.
In establishing my identity as an adult woman since my childhood, whenever I came across distress, I went to immerse myself in a landscape and made landscape paintings. As my creation deepened, it went beyond a frame of the landscape paintings. My artistic practice covers areas such as installation, performance and video, which I understand were developed from my landscape paintings. I intend to use landscapes to heal people in a sense.
At a first glance they look deformed and are not recognizable as a landscape painting, I put my work with opposing visuals against a sense of healing but this is my creative act against modernity such as resistance against existing values, replacement of gender roles, conceptual suggestions about aesthetics. As a result, people who hold anguish against contemporary society sometimes feel a sense of healing in a way upon viewing my works that challenge existing social notions. Considering a sense of healing in appreciating a landscape with reference in art history, I believe that a rise of popularity in landscape paintings was indeed caused by huge changes in Modern times, which affected roles of humans and nature, as well as human society itself.
I take this as my main research theme and examine landscape paintings and my own works to create pieces that merge cultures of Japan and the Western countries, as well as ones that guide us to have clues for our better living. With traditional landscape paintings inherited from the past, I would like to pass down actual feelings existing “between a landscape and a landscape painting” and “between visual sensory and physical sensory”.It will be very fortunate to see my works giving healing effects to my audience who has distress and exhaustion to recognize a new sense of notion and to get them healed by my works.
Fuku 28 ZAKI Beach Festival
This project was about “Home and Art” and started in Fukutsu city, Fukuoka, which was my birthplace. I developed it as an artist, as well as the director, and named it “Fuku 28 ZAKI Beach Festival” in 2013.
This project was about “Home and Art” and started in Fukutsu city, Fukuoka, which was my birthplace. I developed it as an artist, as well as the director, and named it “Fuku 28 ZAKI Beach Festival” in 2013.
Besides consisting of a group exhibition, talks, and performances, this project always had moments shared with presence of my Tomokiyo Family, Tamura family, and my younger sister’s family. I was born in Fukuoka in 1984 and moved up to Tokyo when I was 19 years old. In the year when I left my hometown, my town merged with two neighboring towns to form a larger city and the city was named “Fukutsu city”, which contains initial letters borrowed from the names of these two towns. There were the following reasons why I started working on the projects relating with Fukuoka. While working on original sceneries in Tokyo, there was a transformation through developments upon the merger near my hometown where the original sceneries remained. Through the development and my experience in the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, my understanding about everlasting “original sceneries” in “my hometown” turned over in my mind.
Inseparable from the trend of the time, this project dealt with my family history and led to our rich experiences with the project. However, it was not about “archives” that cut out historically determining moments, but about “memories” that one with emotions contemplates way of life in flux. I wonder that it seems more natural to think that “memories” transforms to “archives”. In my project, I would like to put an importance on “the sense of real time” which represents being present progressive for further development, since it is unable to make things past.
The appearance of the venue from the beginning, former Tamanoi Ryokan (Hotel).
The owner himself archives the works, film posters and a collection of books while running the café.