My practice begins with a question: under what conditions does an image come into being? Working with materials such as pigment, copper leaf, mirrors, water, and paper, I have been interested not only in material itself but in the ways an image appears, shifts, and disappears through its relationship with light, time, the viewer’s body, and the surrounding space.

In my mirror works, the image is never fixed on a support. The viewer’s body, the surrounding space, and changing light enter the work, and the image changes as the viewing position changes. For me, the mirror became a device for destabilizing the boundary between a work and the world around it, allowing an entirety that cannot be grasped directly to emerge through fragments.

Since 2013, while developing Cliff Edge Project in the Izu Peninsula, this question has expanded from the exhibition space to the land itself: faults, topography, volcanoes, traces of disasters, testimony, photographs, maps, water systems, and local belief. Human time accumulated in a place and geological time began to enter the conditions through which a work could take form. Rather than representing a place, the work itself came to change through its relationship with that place.

At the same time, the more I worked with memories embedded in the land, the more pressing another question became: who speaks, from what position, and with what grounds to speak? When researching disasters I did not experience, receiving other people’s testimony and presenting it within an artwork, I came to think that my role was not to speak on behalf of someone else’s experience. Instead, it was to construct conditions in which a speaker can speak, a listener can listen, and documents and objects can open onto another time.

This question now extends into Ancestral Stories. I am researching memories within my own family—including stories of Siberian internment told directly by my grandfather, military records left by my paternal grandfather, and the memories of relatives who returned from the Korean Peninsula—by comparing official records, letters, photographs, diaries, and family testimony. My concern is less with reconstructing the past than with how generations that did not experience these events receive inherited memory, what they pass on, and what remains impossible to fully narrate.

Alongside this work on inherited family memory, my attention is beginning to turn again toward the geological time of the land. In the next phase of my practice, I am interested in taking volcanoes as a point of departure for exploring relationships among geology, water, belief, the city, and the human body. Through walking, observation, and field research, I want to approach structures and temporal scales that cannot be grasped at a human scale, allowing an invisible whole to emerge provisionally through dispersed places and fragments.

Drawing continues alongside these research-based practices as a fundamental discipline. Testing line, form, density, negative space, and scale through drawing is also a way of returning formal judgment to the body.

For me, research and making are not separate stages. Investigating documents, testimony, land, materials, and bodies changes the form of a work, while making can reopen relationships that research alone had overlooked. Through this movement back and forth, I want to bring into experience relationships that cannot normally be seen all at once—not as fixed explanations, but as forms that can be encountered.