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I am obsessed with things that disappear. Life flows by as if I were scooping sand with my hands—constantly losing something irretrievable. The fragments slipping through my fingers are like shards of moments that will never return. Faced with repeated loss, I wander; I struggle not to forget even moments of happiness, yet the memories I cling to eventually turn into longing that hurts me. Technology has advanced, but emotions have grown shallow; relationships intertwine rapidly, yet genuine connection has become increasingly difficult. The era I call the Modern Dystopia endlessly accelerates the speed of loss. And the faster everything fades, the more I cling to the past, aching with the pain of oblivion before vanishing memories.
Nostalgia, to me, is not mere sentimentality or longing—it is the primal impulse that drives my work. At the place where something once whole has vanished, and within the desire to recover it, I am drawn into chaos even as I am propelled forward. The more I try to hold on to memory, the more it dissolves and distorts, and time bends so that my past and present selves can no longer align. What remains is only a faint, stinging afterimage—unclear yet tender. Still, I cannot stop trying to connect fragments across time, for I fear that if I stop, everything will disappear entirely.
Disappearance spares no one—not even humans. We are consumed, and ultimately, we fade. Memory, passion, emotion—all dull over time, wearing down like joints. Time does not wait for us, and every attempt to capture a fleeting moment ends in failure. Yet while I cannot stop time, I can choose to flow gently with it. That is why I wish to become a supple being, soft like time itself. I deceive myself into thinking that by recovering what was lost, I might finally reach the state—or the self—I have longed for.
My works are traces born between this faith and fear. Through cold yet organic materials, I metaphorically explore the corporeality of human beings and their gradual consumption. I record sensations that are carved away and worn down, memories that scatter like fragments, and movements that strive to connect with others even as perception and memory fade. It is the moment when two opposing impulses—loss and connection, consumption and exchange—collide.
To grasp what disappears is to endure pain. Yet that pain does not destroy me; it leads me toward connection. It acts as a bridge—linking past and present, the self and the other. Thus, my work is not a mere elegy for what has vanished, but a record of the human will to reach out and connect, even in depletion. Through that record, I wish to show that even if everything ultimately disappears, there once existed traces that were unmistakably real, and moments where we were truly connected.
These acts of “connection” are always accompanied by the means of “language.”
Language is carried as speech through the mouth, and this point also occupies an important position within my working concept. Because of my timid nature, I often fail to say what I want at the right moment and live with a lingering sense of regret. However, all relationships are woven and sustained through communication. For this reason, the site of conversation becomes a field of contestation for me. That desire is given life as heat in the throat.
For this reason, I believe that sexuality inevitably exists within language. People often say, “to spare one’s words.” To spare words feels to me like sparing the other person, and at the same time, an attitude of sparing myself. When this is repeated, one arrives at a state in which understanding is possible even without speaking. That is the ideal of human relationships I pursue.
That which is invisible yet distinctly perceptible—certain beliefs leave powerful traces. Words that evaporate if no one utters them, or the strong magnetism that comes into effect the moment they are expelled through the mouth—this is the sexuality of language that I believe in. The sticky point of continuation is both the moment I was connected to someone I wished to speak to, and the deeply imprinted trace of that relationship. I explore language and non-language, and the desires intermingled within them.
Thus, I consider the act of gathering into a single flow that which disappears, the act of trying to hold onto it, the reasons for doing so, and the traces left by those reasons to be my task and our shared destiny. Through my work, a non-verbal language, I wish to explore this.
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