Concentration toward Infinity (Fragment) (2001) consists of two narrow acrylic-on-panel paintings, each 3000 × 450 mm, one based on red and the other on blue. From a distance the surfaces appear almost homogeneous, yet at close range minute differences of density are distributed across a range too broad to be grasped as a single gradation. Difference can be detected locally without ever becoming comprehensible as a whole.

“Concentration” names a scale of change that exceeds the range within which perception can compare one point with another: change exists, yet it appears nearly uniform. “Fragment” likewise does not mean unfinished or deficient. It treats the painting not as a self-contained object bounded by four edges but as a portion exposed within a chain that could continue indefinitely. The viewer knows they see only a part, yet cannot avoid constructing the sense of an unseen whole.

This conception shares with Naoki Suwa’s Infinitely Connected Paintings and the Japanese handscroll format the idea that an image does not end within a single frame but continues beyond it. By translating such a horizontally extending structure into a three-meter vertical format, the viewer does not survey the painting at once, but experiences the fragment while checking their own bodily position in relation to it. The problem of perception filling in what is not visible and imagining a whole moves beyond the pictorial surface in the next work, Redline, expanding into bodily movement and architectural space.