Receiving That Day
 

Solo Exhibition / 2025 /  Contemporary Art Foundation, Tokyo, Japan

A drawing series I've continued since 2019.
This drawing can only be created during a specific few days each year. The newspaper sheets used for the drawing are selected annually from articles dated August 6th to 10th, which cover the past atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Within a single sheet of paper, articles about the past atomic bombings coexist with reports on current issues unfolding at that very moment.
I draw today's sky upon these two layers of time—past and present. I feel a sense of crisis as memories of war and the shared postwar social understanding fade from within us.
Beyond the light blue surface, words that are very much of the present—never the past—“Using the atomic bomb is also an option,” “Ordering the Department of Defense to conduct nuclear weapons tests,” “Drone attacks on nuclear power plants,” “Reviewing the Three Non-Nuclear Principles”—emerge.

Even so, I believe I will paint today's sky again next year, and continue painting today's sky for years and decades to come, as long as I live.

“Receiving That Day” is an installation work utilizing the 27 drawings created thus far.
The following text was written for the solo exhibition “Receiving That Day.”
 

Receiving That Day

When I was pregnant with my son, I began working on the “Drawings on Newspaper” series at home. I would pick a single sheet from a newspaper I had already read and shade over it with a 10B graphite pencil, as if erasing everything on the page. As I continued the series, this process eventually led me to another kind of drawing.
One morning, like any other day, I walked to the front door to pick up the newspaper. In the lingering summer heat of the night before, I reached into the mailbox and suddenly realized something: I already knew what the paper said and what images were inside it. It was the August 6 edition. Of course, that made sense—but since I had been thinking a lot about time while working on these drawings, I felt for a brief moment like someone who had come from the future.
From that seemingly insignificant experience, I began working on another series of drawings. Every year between August 6 and 10, I draw the sky of that day onto newspaper spreads that feature articles about the atomic bomb. It’ s  as if I’ m holding the newspaper to the sky, receiving the light and color as it seeps into the page.
I have lived through times when it is normal to hear someone say, “It’ s that day of the year.” Will I go on drawing this beautiful sky for as long as I live? Will the media continue to retell history? Will humanity make the same mistakes again?
One day, I was in my studio coloring over a newspaper spread when I came across a passage from a researcher.
Borrowing the words of a French philosopher, they described how, if the Earth were an apple, we would be living inside its skin—a thin, fragile layer just a few kilometers deep. Within that delicate, blue membrane, I imagined being born, loving someone, and eventually dying. I then found myself gazing at my nine-year-old son, who was playing in front of me.
As I imagine a pale blue space, ten or twenty years from now, filled with hundreds of drawings yet to be made, I draw today’ s sky with a feeling akin to prayer.