My Artistic Journey

Looking back on my artistic practice, the first major turning point came during my years studying printmaking at Tokyo University of the Arts.

I initially entered the Oil Painting Department, although I had never attended an art preparatory school or studied under a professional painter. In many ways, it felt as though I had come directly from the art room of a provincial high school into the highly competitive environment of the university. I became acutely aware of the gap between my own experience and that of those around me, and for a time, I lost any clear sense of what I wanted to paint.

From the 1970s into the early 1980s, the art world was marked by the coexistence of many different movements and approaches: Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Minimalism, Conceptual Art, and Mono-ha, among others. It was a period in which artistic discourse had branched in many directions, and I struggled to determine where I stood within it.

For a time, I stopped painting altogether. Hoping that printmaking might offer another way forward, I transferred to the Printmaking Department in my third year. At the time, artists such as Tetsuro Komai, Tetsuya Noda, and Tadayoshi Nakabayashi were teaching there, while a number of senior students close to me were beginning to establish themselves in Japan’s contemporary art scene.

I explored a range of printmaking techniques, but eventually felt, almost intuitively, that screenprinting might allow me to develop a language of my own. I was particularly drawn to compositions built around areas of color.

From that point onward, my work moved toward a minimal visual language in which fragments of everyday memory were expressed through pale colors and simplified arrangements of flat color. By introducing a sense of emotion and atmosphere into these restrained compositions, I gradually found a direction that felt genuinely my own.

Returning to Art (1998–)

After completing graduate school, I worked for a design company in Tokyo. A few years later, I returned to the countryside of Niigata and began working as a teacher. I stayed away from making art for quite some time, but in 1998, I began creating screenprints and drawings again.

In a sense, I started again from the point where I had left off—from the minimal visual language of my earlier work.

Living in the quiet environment of Niigata, away from Tokyo, allowed me to work with fewer distractions. I became less concerned with trends or how others might respond to my work, and began creating more freely, following my own instincts and interests.

I became increasingly conscious of the Japanese concept of ma—the expressive space or interval between things—and began to use fragments of everyday life and personal emotion as motifs in my work.

Surrounded by mountains, rivers, the sea, and the changing landscapes of the four seasons, I also began to seek a sense of peace and stillness in the familiar world around me.

As I continued working, however, a question gradually began to emerge.

Was I simply making paintings that I found beautiful, satisfying my own aesthetic and pictorial desires?

The question shifted from “How should I paint?” to “Why do I paint?”

Over time, that question became increasingly important to me.

2018 — A Turning Point

In 2018, I had an experience at a shrine in Niigata that I still can't fully explain.

Every year in early November, the shrine holds a night festival. Countless candles are lit near the grounds, each carrying someone's wish, and a great pool of light rises up out of the dark mountains. Hundreds of people gather there, looking up at the night sky.

According to local lore, a glowing bird appears from behind the shrine after dark and rises into the sky — people spoke of it as a manifestation of the kami.

I was half-skeptical. My wife and I stood there late into the night, looking up, but nothing happened. My neck was starting to ache when someone nearby suddenly pointed at the sky.

"There — look, over there."

I looked, and in the dark sky, a few small lights were moving.

They beat like wings, like a bird — but not like any ordinary bird. Their bodies seemed to glow faintly, their outlines blurred, almost translucent. Each wingbeat made the shape dissolve a little, so that it looked, by turns, like some other creature, or like light itself simply moving.

It wasn't a fixed point of light. It moved through the sky like a living thing, changing direction, and eventually passed over our heads and vanished into the darkness to the south. I think it lasted only a minute or two.

I just stood there, stunned. It wasn't so much a feeling of beauty as the sense that something unexplainable had stepped into the reality I thought I knew.

Wanting to confirm what I'd seen, I went back to the same festival year after year, and each time — though the shape or distance was different — I saw the same kind of glowing thing. Once it appeared just as the rain briefly stopped; another time it seemed to glide in close to the crowd; another time, just one small light circled far off in the sky.

I still can't explain what it was.

But since then, I've become strongly aware that behind the world we call "reality," there might be another world we can't see. Even the Shinto view of nature, which I'd only understood before as a kind of philosophy, suddenly felt personal — in the forest, the trees, the water, the wind, maybe there's something there that human eyes can't fully grasp.

That feeling quietly took root inside me. But it didn't show up in my work right away — it took a few years of sorting through what I'd already painted, and working through, inside myself, what the experience meant.

2025 — A New Direction

Around 2025, my painting started to change — and not just a little.

What I'm trying to paint now isn't visible nature itself.

It's a presence, still unnamed, hidden deep inside nature. A force trying to be born there. And the boundary where the visible world touches the invisible one.

The color-field structures and pictorial logic I learned back in school. The nature and everyday things I've kept painting for years. And that experience I had in 2018.

Looking back, none of it was ever really separate. Over a long time, it's all been quietly coming together in my paintings now.

Underneath it all is a Shinto and Buddhist way of seeing the world — values I picked up just from growing up close to nature. Only now do I realize it's been shaping who I am without my even noticing, and pushing me to give it form and put it out into the world through art. This is the last stretch of my life now. I'm not going to paint to chase trends or please anyone. I'll face each painting seriously, one by one, trusting my own instincts and wrestling it into shape. If that reaches the eyes and hearts of the people who see it, I'll be happy.