Kusho
As a young student, I often wrote Chinese characters in sumi ink. I loved the nervous, precarious feeling of sitting before an empty white page, the moment just before my brush touched the paper. I was always excited to see the unique result of each new brushing.
Once your brush touches paper, you must finish the character, you have one chance. It can never be repeated or duplicated. You must commit your full attention and being to each stroke. Liquids, like ink, are elusive by nature. As sumi ink finds its own path through the paper grain, liquid finds its unique path as it moves through air.
Remembering those childhood moments, of ink and empty page, I fashioned a large “brush” and bucket of ink. I get the same feeling, a precarious nervous excitement, as I stand before the empty studio space. Each stroke is unique, ephemeral. I can never copy or recreate them. I know something fantastic is happening. “a decisive moment”, but I can’t fully understand the event until I look at these captured afterimages, these paintings in the sky.
Water Sculpture
I am fascinated by the fragility and incompleteness that exists with all things beautiful.
I throw water into the air, and in mid-flight it changes shape constantly, being pulled by gravity and bursting with surface tension. Each flight barely lasts more than a
second.
In each moment, the water becomes a beautiful figure which can be defined as a “part man-made and part natural”
sculpture.
I wanted to capture these beautiful impermanent water sculptures by photographing them in the exact moment, when the essence of their existence is pure.
Gardens
It is said that a Zen garden represents in a three dimensional space the spirits of high priests who have achieved enlightenment. The Zen garden is the expression of boundless cosmic beauty in a physical environment, created through intense human concentration, labor and repeated action.
One can attain a feeling of serenity by simply being in the space of a Zen garden. It is its own universe, empowering the visitor to resist temptation, eliminate negative thought, and sever the continuous stream of inessential information emanating from the outside world.
I have tried to represent this feeling I get from Zen gardens in my artwork. Although I am still far from those enlightened monks who labor in nature, my actions of repeatedly throwing liquid into the air and photographing the resulting shapes and sculptural formations over and over-endlessly-could be considered a form of spiritual practice to find personal enlightenment.
Nude
I tried to capture the beauty of both the human body’s figure and its motion.
The figure in the image, which is formed into something similar to a sculpture, is created by combining 10,000 individual photographs of a dancer.
By putting together uninterrupted individual moments, the resulting image as a whole will appear to be something different from what actually exists.
With regard to these two viewpoints, a connection can be made to a human being’s perception of presence in life.
Dancer
Light Sculpture
As I was creating water sculptures with a point light source much like sunlight, sometimes I would notice colors appearing from time to time within the water droplets.
At the time I had no idea what was causing these colors to appear, but later learned that this phenomenon was created by random occurrences of refraction and diffraction of light.
I was then able to add colors to the water droplets through this phenomenon.
The body of color that appears when I added light to the almost perfectly spherical droplet of water resembles something like a sculpture made of light.
