Today, I would like to talk you about the theme of my art. Mainly, the themes of my art works are solitude and depression that people in the modern world struggle with. In addition, the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake and tsunami, especially the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, have affected my art. My artworks can be classified into two types. The first is a series of portrait paintings titled “Children of this Planet” and “Whereabouts of God.” The second is a collage piece series of anime heroes and magical girls. There are many similarities between those children portraits and collage pieces. Let me explain about the features of each series

The paintings named “Children of this Planet” are large eyed children with vacant expressions. Those vacant children are, so to speak, “cups of my emotions“- something which I could pour my emotion into. Therefore, in each work, my main subject is my feelings, rather than the child itself. The children I depict are usually empty, and look lonely. That derives from my own childhood experiences. I’m feeling that everyone has a sense of solitude and depression today. The reason I use children as my motifs is that children possess a simpler existence. This is because their identity is ambiguous. The child is not borne into his or her personality, and his existence is full of possibility. This allows me to project various feelings into the subject. This makes each piece unique and original.

 Here’s my “Whereabouts of God” series. Nuclear disasters are represented in this series.

In April of 1986, there was a nuclear disaster in Chernobyl. Children who had lived near that nuclear power plant developed thyroid cancer. The procedure to remove this cancer leaves a horizontal scar at the base of their neck. The use of the word “necklace” indicates its visual resemblance to the horizontal scar around the neck. It also contrasts the negative connotations of the scar with the beauty of an actual necklace.

I compare this situation to the Fukushima nuclear disaster. It’s been four years since the disaster, and there has not been any official announcement regarding affected children yet. No one knows if those children will wear a similar “Fukushima necklace” in the future. I couldn’t live in Japan without recognizing these concerns. On the other hand, I do hope that is just my personal over-concern. The twinkling scar in this series is a metaphor of my ambivalent feelings. The scar itself is our reality, in which we are still facing problems in Fukushima. The twinkling stars are my wishes.

     Maybe you noticed the children in this series have horns on their forehead. Those horns are metaphor for fury and despair that people feel towards unreasonable things in this world. It is my opinion that there are people who just have to accept their reality and can’t do anything. The horns are my way of communicating what cannot be said. I call them “wordless words”. 

The next topic is my collage work. I create collages based on original story of mine. This story is about artificial heroism to defend the world. At a certain time in the future where human beings are in despair, they create a savior to get return hope back into their world. The savior achieves its mission, but that means the extinction of human beings. - In this collage series, saviors are depicted at a time after “salvation.” Please look at the images. You can see the two saviors; one is a child putting on heroic costumes like Superman, and the other is a magical girl, an anime sub-genre of young girls who use magic. 

Except for the main heroic character, there are small rabbits also dressed like heroes. Those rabbit heroes represent humanity. My message here is that every human has failed at saving the world. 

My inspirations for these collages are the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, and Fukushima. The earthquake and tsunami were beyond our ability to control. The nuclear disaster presents a huge risk to the life of many people, while nuclear power makes our life convenient. After Fukushima, there were many protests and demonstrations against nuclear power plants in Japan. Once, I had hoped that Japan would have given up nuclear power, but Japan is still pursuing it. In other words, we are constructing the very thing that may kill us. When I noticed that fact, I scared that desire to extinct might be integrated in human DNA, because I can feel there’s a huge and helpless power that we can never conquer at individual levels.

Like ancient people created their saviors, what kind of saviors could be created in the modern society? This question makes me think about heroes and magical girls that appear in anime and manga. These characters represent the fantasy of youth today. Each generation leaves their world to the next generation to keep and protect. This is a cycle repeated throughout time. Therefore, the heroes and magical girls in these collage pieces are my image of ourselves. 

There is a term for another technique I use, and that is “comparative expression.”

I recognized something after the earthquake- my place was far from the center of the shock and I was totally safe. And there was a contrast between my reality and the one presented on TV. To reveal this contrast, I pick up excessively beautiful and cheerful motifs. Sometimes, I use Japanese words in my works which mean negative feelings such as “wanna die” or “too sad to live” in Japanese. Those negative words coexist with the beautiful motifs. This is my experimental way to reflect our real world.

There’s another contrast in my collage; that is a pairing of “fantasy” and “reality.” This is represented by a contrast between my hand-painted parts and the ready-made stickers. In my opinion, the cuteness of the stickers might be inauspicious intention to deceive people with such rhetorical flourishes.

Other stickers use cheerful phrases like “Best friends forever” and “You can do it!”. Those words are not my own real voice- they are commercially produced words. By putting cheerful cute word stickers and negative Japanese words together, I’m trying to create various aspects of the world.

There are more examples of comparison in my collage works: Life and death, light and darkness, and positive words and negative words… A chaotic world appears as I use those elements on the canvas. You can see the piece as a cute work at the first glance- but the more you look at it, the scarier it might become. You may notice these various aspects are in layers. And this is my view of the world.

 I’m using this same technique in my paintings “Children of this Planet”. One of their eyes is always twinkling, and the other is dark. In addition, colorful and pastel colors serve as foil to my darker themes.  

 “Kawaii” is another important key in my artworks. “Kawaii” is a word in Japanese, meaning "pretty; cute; lovely; charming; dear; darling." “Kawaii has become synonymous with Japanese culture. It’s another tool I use in order to connect with audiences through my artwork.

By creating artworks, I would like to reveal the natures of this world as I see it. For me, art is the best tool to express my thoughts. I’m always trying to draw things that catch people’s attention, such a big Anime eyes, and characters wearing famous costumes like Superman or Sailor Moon. And I would like to keep creating artworks that show struggles we have in today’s world.

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This topic is made from the contents of a lecture held in Berlin in May, 2015.
You can download the movie of the lecture in the following link.
PICTOPLASMA Picto Talks