Midori no Daichi (2000) consists of a transparent rectangular case filled with a thick layer of terre verte pigment, with a broad bean seed planted at its center. Its materials are terre verte pigment, seed, wood, and acrylic panel. There is no canvas and no depiction: the “earth” from which paint is made becomes the ground itself, and germination and growth replace the finished image with a process unfolding in time.

The central question is where earth and mineral become separated from their material origin and fixed as “paint” or “color.” Terre verte carries geological time as green earth, yet in a tube it is consumed as a standardized color. By using pigment not as paint but as soil, the work attempted to return color from a representational tool to a fundamental material. Later experiences with the same green earth in fresco, and with Florence’s Chiostro Verde, reilluminated this distance between earth and paint.

The work was shown in Gōka Soshina!! at the Kanazawa Citizen’s Art Center, concurrently with the lecture “On Making Exhibitions.” Harald Szeemann, visiting as the lecturer, toured the exhibition and wrote in green ink: “Courage that the 4-sided trope comes out.” The handwriting is not fully legible, but “4-sided” and “comes out” suggest a four-sided painting understood as a conventional trope, and the courage to accept what escapes from it. Here pigment literally comes out of painting and returns to earth. The question of how far such an overflow can still be taken up as a work was carried into the practice that followed.