The house where I lived as a child was a space in which the walls, the ceiling, and the floor were each composed of different materials and different patterns. As I let my eyes vaguely follow the lines of those patterns, what had been mere pattern would gradually rise into the forms of people and animals. From this experience, I think that I was trying to see the world on my own initiative — that I was actively seeing the world.
After I began wearing a uniform, however, I came to feel acutely the helplessness of merely being seen. Precisely because everyone wore the same thing, the uniform felt rather like a device that emphasized the differences with which we were born. I became strongly conscious of the gaze of others, and the time I spent standing as "the self that is seen" grew longer.
Later, when I began choosing my own clothes, a sense emerged that — while still being seen — I could intervene in how I was seen. It is not that I fully control how I am seen, but neither is it complete passivity. The state of gaze that lies between these — this I call an adorning gaze.
In my practice, I refer to the kimekomi technique of Japanese ningyō dolls, and I embed fabric into the support. The fabric enters the interior while a portion of it remains on the surface, forming a structure in which inside and outside, front and back, do not clearly separate. Through the way the painting changes in appearance according to the viewer's distance and position, the very state of a gaze moving back and forth is raised up as the structure of painting itself.
