R.D.S. — Rorschach Drawing Series — (2004–) uses decalcomania to generate bilateral forms. The artist can control the color, quantity, and placement of paint, but viscosity, fluidity, absorption into the paper, and pressure prevent the final form from being fully determined. The image emerges between deliberate manipulation and the behavior of the material.

The series begins from a memory of taking a Rorschach test in junior high school and seeing a bat-like form emerge from a symmetrical black image. It also reflects the influence of Yugu Renkan, an exhibition and publishing activity that developed around the doctoral program at Kanazawa College of Art. There, a work was understood not as a vehicle for transmitting a completed meaning, but as something discovered through the relationship between the work and the viewer.

At the 2004 exhibition “Consciousness and Object,” sheets of paper were provided for visitors to write down what the iconography looked like to them. The same form might appear as a flower to one person, a pelvis to another, or two facing faces to someone else. What mattered was not what it meant, but the fact that different images emerged from the same object. Although R.D.S. uses no reflective surface, in this sense it became a “mirror without reflection” leading directly toward the Mirror Work Series.