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Obscure and Uncertain Extent of Boundary"I am a see-er with moving body; my body holds things in a circle around itself; it is situated at the center of the world. Things are a prolongation of the body; the world is made of the very stuff of the body. Moreover, my moving body makes a difference in the visible world, being a part of it; that is why I can steer it through the visible. I do not appropriate what I see; I am caught in the fabric of the world."
M. Merleau-Ponty, Eye and Mind
In 1995 I gave up my studio to work at home in Utsunomiya before participating in the Artist in Residence program in Canada. That was when I decided to abandon the materials and techniques that I had been using until then. I repeatedly asked myself the same question: "Who I am I? Where did I come from? Where will I go?" Suddenly, the clothes that I wore in my childhood drew my attention. Surprisingly, the underwear and even the diapers that I wore in my infancy were all intact. I sought a concept for working in the ambiguous and mutually dependent relationship between the body and the world, and I instinctively felt the possibility of sculpture in the clothes situated at their boundary.
The clothes, which are part of the world, become part of the body through being worn. I therefore thought that the clothes, situated on the boundary between the body and the world, would be a fit concept to represent the obscure and uncertain extent of boundary between individuals in our time. I aimed to realize such sculpture, not as the objective figure or the interpretation of the world supported by a central axis, quantitative and self-contained, but as the intermediary which does not have a hierarchical system within itself, but has a pattern like fabric, which shows every part to be equal.
In that summer of 1995, I made "Red Reflection," my first installation constructed of old clothes. I sewed together, and stained my own and my family's underwear red, also using clothing that I collected in Canada. "Graf '04" is my latest old-clothes installation, made using the same concept. With each new installation, the amount of old clothing used to create it increases. For "Graf '04," I used about 6,000 pieces of old clothing, including underwear worn by my newborn baby.
Through the birth of my child, I found that the world exists not only outside the body, but also inside it. I created "Passage '04," The Matrix of Space I-IV ," and other work by considering how to disclose the world inside the body. I believe that the clothes represent the patterns of the body. My new installation is molded directly from a body.
If we trace the descent of wombs, which represent the matrices of bodies from children to mothers, mothers to grandmothers, and grandmothers to great-grandmothers, we find that our bodies have the composite patterns formed through the innumerable and invisible matrices since Eve, the progenitor of the human race.
I created "Passage '04" and "The Matrix of Space
I - IV," based on the interdependent relationship between
a body and space, revealed by tracing time since the birth of
human beings. These installations become visible in the sight
of viewers as they move with the figures of bodies latent in the
fabric of space. They represent the temporal emergence of space.