While walking through urban spaces, I feel a strange sense of floating when I observe the sky and cityscapes reflected in glass curtain walls — and my own reflection among them. The landscape I perceive as a phenomenon is simultaneously projected onto the glass as a reflected image, and the urban scenery seems to be perceived in a doubled state.
There, too, exists my gaze directed — with a sense of distance — toward the interior of the building, the inside of the glass, and in many cases, intertwined with the desires of consumption, what seems like a semiotic processing occurs in my mind from moment to moment.
The urban landscape, carrying this multiplicity of vision, internalizes that vision as something that includes one's own mirror image, and further renders the process of internalization itself colorless and transparent. Perhaps it is this colorless and transparent process of internalization that is the source of the city's floating sensation — I sometimes find myself thinking this.
In my recent painting practice, I have first been considering layering this colorless and transparent layer of the glass curtain wall onto the picture plane. Beyond that, I am exploring whether it might be possible to transform the function of this layer — not in the direction of urbanization and humanization, which drives semiotic processing forward, but into a vector of the non-semiotic and the non-human, its very opposite.
This brings to mind how Lewis Carroll, within linguistic expression, transformed language not into a vector of meaning, but into a vector of nonsense.
I believe that the contemporary urban landscape doubled by glass can be traced back, at its origin, to the Crystal Palace, constructed for the Great Exhibition held in London. The mass production of glass made possible by the Industrial Revolution gave rise to exhibition halls, glass-roofed train stations, grand greenhouses, and the gaze of window shopping. Might not these things, born of the changes of the era, serve as motifs for the transformation of meaning in Carroll's novels as well?
Many of the potted houseplants depicted in my paintings are placed near windows. In this exhibition, I paint many houseplants found in office buildings in Marunouchi and Otemachi. What draws me to these as motifs is the way houseplants exist as something difficult to categorize as either natural or artificial. Are they living things, or objects? I am deeply interested in what these lush, verdant things that surround us are — things that lack any connection to the ground.
The philosopher Emanuele Coccia states that, ecologically and structurally, plants are dual beings. He conceives of a plant's roots as a latent second body, directing the plant itself toward the exact opposite of where all its above-ground efforts are aimed. He argues that it is precisely this duality — the visible form of the plant above ground and the latent activity of its roots below — that generates the very environment in which we live. By mixing the mineral world underground with the rays of the sun, the environment we inhabit is created.
By extension, I think that potted houseplants are granted only a limited underground domain for their latent activity. Access to the earth has been severed. That very fact becomes the condition of life for houseplants in social space — and it overlaps greatly with the conditions of life for us humans, living here on the surface of the earth.
The exhibition title, "To the Ground, to Above the Ground, Into and Out of the Crystal Palace," arbitrarily extracts and renders into language a part of what occurs within the experience of viewing a single painting.
The multiplicity of vision carried by the urban landscape; the colorless and transparent process of internalization and the floating sensation. The limited relationship with one's environment and the severed access to the ground.
These become the motifs from which paintings are drawn forth, accompanied by a structure of inversion.
"To the Ground, to Above the Ground, Into and Out of the Crystal Palace" Artist Statement