Through making works of art in my career, I have been exploring the theme “the unreliability of communication.” My focus in the creative process is the gap between how I view myself and how others perceive me. In other words, I am haunted by “[a sort of] discrepancy in communication.”
For example,Signmaker Nakazaki, a parodic performance of running a nameboard shop in my early time, was themed on the gap and discrepancy between the perception of a product and the product itself. From my understanding, highly common miscommunications, including misunderstandings and misinterpretations which people often experience in daily life, are the fundamental form of communication that humans inherently possess; therefore, I have been using miscommunication as a motif in my works. Sometimes, I also apply propaganda-like performances that cause mass crazes as a criticism of the form of communication.
Recently, I have been particularly interested in the distance between memory and fact. On one hand, when something is verbalized based on a false memory, the words spoken become realized as “facts.” On the other hand, written history may sometimes be dominated via collective ambiguous memories. In my imagination, these processes seem to blur the boundaries between “the big” and “the small,” as well as one between the truth and lies. The material I use is not essential. More importantly, the work should function to remind the viewer of something that has not yet happened, which occasionally becomes reality. I consider this “something possible” as a work of art itself.