Image of work : " Immortal landscape (Fountain)" (2024), Mud from the Red hot spring in Beppu, pigments and oil on canvas from the Pool of Blood Hell




The joint research with the Shiseido Mirai Research Group gave me the opportunity to explore the possibilities of material exploration more consciously. The concept of Fluctuating Painting Space, which I arrived at by fusing the characteristics of my original brushstrokes, my own pigments and a light-reflecting material known as pearlescent material, has broadened my own interest in the world.

In the process of discovering the Japanese word 'Mosho' , I learnt the name of a colour unique to Japan, and the connection between colour and language is something that carries the four seasons and culture of Japan into the present day. And, at a deeper level, I became reawakened to a renewed interest in the Japanese philosophy of life and death, which is a fusion of Shintoism and Buddhism, and is linked to an animistic spirituality.

With this interest as a basis, I travelled around Japan in exhibitions and was finally invited to Beppu City, Oita Prefecture, as a residency site. Having studied Western contemporary art in the UK, Nature (Nature) is traditionally seen in Western philosophy as something that confronts humans.
However, through my research into colour, which is essential to the production of my work, I began to wonder whether I could directly incorporate into my work the relationship with nature, both physically and spiritually coexisting with it, as people of ancient times felt.
Through the production of paintings, I wanted to keep the actual state of the earth in my work, as if I were approaching the ancient Buddhist experience of nature (jinen). I came to the conclusion that this would be an act of creation in which the unconscious and the body overlap.

Beppu has the largest number of springs and the largest amount of hot springs in Japan, and we can physically feel the continuous flow of geothermal energy. It was a place that evoked our human physicality, which we easily forget in urban spaces.

As I have also explored in the series of works I have created with the motif of water, which transforms and circulates, I have used ‘water’ as a metaphor for the active positive force that celebrates and animates life in my pictorial expression. However, a visit to Beppu dismisses such static notions. It recalled the smallness of human existence and a sense of awe towards nature, which lives in the earth that even contains geothermal heat.

The sublimation of these ideas was the five-painting work 'Immortal landscape (Fountain)' and 'From the Shore'. At this time, I physically incorporated a part of the land into the compositional elements of the work. The mud from the Red hot spring was dried, refined and reused as paint. This series of processes is a decision that emphasises the physical aspect of the expressionist who generates a pictorial space using my own body as a medium.

The encounter between my own 'life' and the 'place' with its own energy overlaps with the memories and history of the place, including those who once visited Beppu for a hot-spring cure, and at the same time, the far-reaching expanse of nature in its haze is a metaphor for the connection with time and the flow of generation that is longer than a single human lifetime.

Image of work : "From the shore" (2024), Mud from the Red hot spring in Beppu, pigments and oil on canvas from the Pool of Blood Hell