Blood Wall Blood Mirror (2003) was an installation presented in the Fresco Studio of the Mural Laboratory at the Toride Campus of Tokyo University of the Arts. A wall coated with blood and a circular mirror work were placed within the same space. The starting point was a question: when color or material is introduced onto the surface of a mirror, how does that material affect the meaning of the self-image reflected there?

Blood is a substance of the body, but through ideas such as blood relation, lineage, and ancestry, it is also tied to questions of origin and identity. Is the “I” reflected in the mirror a self produced through that continuity of blood? To what extent is the sense by which one recognizes oneself as oneself determined by lineage or ancestry? By introducing blood onto the mirror surface and the wall, the work attempted to reconsider the relationship between self-image and identity.

At the same time, blood is a highly charged material, and its symbolic force risked overtaking the question itself. This experience of using blood as a material that assigns meaning to the reflected self-image led subsequent works toward quieter surfaces and toward the conditions of reflection itself, examining more precisely how images come into being and how they resist being fixed.