photo by Keizo Kioku

"I was reminded of textbooks after the War. Your work is beautiful, though."

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An elderly man said that to me, after coming to see the work then it first featured in a solo exhibition of mine. At the time, there was a problem with official documents being manipulated, and "blacked out documents" were everywhere. What must he have thought, seeing blacked out images again after more than 70 years?

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The drawings started out as simple scrawls drawn on newspaper. It just so happens that the act of silently erasing what's on the paper leads to the creation of a screen resembling a starry sky. It was like seeing countless stars that had previously been obscured by the city lights. It made me wonder what modern society and the normality of everyday life had hidden from us. Invisibility, as a phenomenon, is not only the result of something being erased. It can also arise when reality is disturbed or overwhelmed by a flood of uncertain information.

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This work has no beginning and no end. It creates a world in which the flow of time has become disjointed, and past and present blend together. I hope that this landscape will allow viewers to feel that present events are part of, and inseparable from, the wider passage of time.