Statement

I work in dakkatsu-kanshitsu — a technique of hollow lacquer sculpture developed in eighth-century Japan for the creation of Buddhist icons. The process is slow and physical: clay is shaped, then layers of hemp cloth soaked in raw lacquer are applied over the form. Once cured, the clay is excavated from within, leaving a shell that is light, resonant, and entirely hollow. The form survives. The interior disappears. What remains is a kind of presence built from absence.
This paradox — solidity born from emptiness — has become the central question of my practice.
My work changed when I faced illness. As my body weakened through treatment, I became acutely aware of a counterforce: the body’s insistence on healing itself. In that same space where I felt despair, I found something that could only be called hope. Darkness and light were not opposites. They inhabited the same moment. I began to understand that the boundary between them — the threshold itself — was where life was most fully present.
Since then, my sculptures have become attempts to give form to that threshold: the border between life and death, interior and exterior, the ancient and the contemporary. I combine traditional urushi lacquer with modern materials — washi-based Warlon sheet, light, and more recently 3D-printed structures — to ask whether a technique 1,300 years old can carry the weight of questions we are still living.
“The lives of living things are limited. In the vastness of the universe, each one may be only a momentary light. I want to hold that light — its brilliance, its fragility, its stubborn insistence on being.”
In 2026, I was in residence at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris. I exhibited new work at the Maison du Japon — a building that holds a large-scale painting by Tsuguharu Foujita, depicting the arrival of Western culture into Japan through the port of Nagasaki. That image of a threshold — a harbor where worlds meet — became the starting point for Cercle de Vie et de Retour (生と還りの環).
Two Japanese artists, separated by a century, met quietly in Paris to think about borders. That encounter, and the silence between us, was itself part of the work.