Concept
My father passed away suddenly this spring. In a family full of longevity, over 100 years old, neither he nor his family had any doubt that this would happen. He had just started keeping two kittens and was also survived by three small tortoises. My father has always loved living creatures, and for...
My father passed away suddenly this spring. In a family full of longevity, over 100 years old, neither he nor his family had any doubt that this would happen. He had just started keeping two kittens and was also survived by three small tortoises. My father has always loved living creatures, and for a while he kept a variety of small animals and insects, buying them from pet stores or catching them in the mountains or on the street. Recently, he gave a goldfish to a turtles and grinned. My mother never ran out of cats in her life, and when my father brought something home, she always forgave him, with a reluctant look on her face. My father caught all kinds of fish, both in the sea and in the river. He and my mother would process and cook the beautiful, glistening fish in large quantities and feed us until we were stuffed to the brim. As for plants, my father loved gardening and my mother loved flower arranging. Father made his own fishing traps and Tsugaru-nuri poles, and he was also a skilled DIYer. My mother had graduated from a dressmaking school and was a skilled operator of a foot-pedal sewing machine. Growing up in such an environment, I, too, loved plants and animals from a young age and played with my hands making things. I was fascinated by the surreal and sweet world of Masamune Kusano's lyrics, Jan Švankmajer's ironic stop motion that directly touched my senses, and Hieronymus Bosch's bizarre characters and chilling religious metaphors when I was in high school. was all the rage, and I started taking pictures. My first favorite motif was the common rubber duck, which I had many of my classmates carry around and place in various locations. I carried the pictures around in a pocket album and took pleasure in showing them to my friends. Around that time, I started collecting my own photos. My older boyfriend, whom I dated for only three months in college, was a photographer, and looking at his pictures reminded me of the time when I was a little girl and never tired of looking at plants and animals. I learned the joy of taking close-ups of plants and animals with a macro lens that I bought with the money from my part-time job and an SLR camera that I inherited from my grandfather. I became fascinated with creating my own worlds and capturing them in photographs, not only through ordinary macro photography, but also by placing real baby snails on snail toys, taking apart beads from necklaces and arranging them neatly in a light box, and so on. At group exhibitions of my club, I displayed an excessive number of photographs as if to show off my collection. When I took a photography class, I learned the joy of taking pictures of rooms while thinking about the history and origins of the objects in the room. I also approached a girl who was selling pictures of insects on the streets of Omotesando, and took pictures of her holding a specimen of a tamamushi in her mouth and having her covered in nameko mushrooms. Once I was able to go abroad on my own, I was so happy to be able to take pictures and make a collection of what I saw that I snapped the shutter like crazy. I also bought dolls and sundries as souvenirs. There was a time when I dreamed of becoming a photographer, and I entered a studio to learn portrait photography, but what I took in my spare time were pictures of fish and mottos intertwined with toys, or albacore on top of various mushrooms to look like a cake. I asked one of my seniors to model for me, but he made me spit out tsukudani clams from his mouth and fell asleep with a vacant look on his face, and I was unable to take any photos that would lead to any work. In 2007, he exhibited 1,000 photographs of objects at the grand prix solo exhibition at the Hitotsubo Exhibition. Since then, he has exhibited abroad more and more, and the amount of toys and folk art he buys locally for his subjects has increased. I took an oversized trunk to bring back souvenirs, picked up several dolls at flea markets in various countries, and when I couldn't fit them in the trunk, I sent 20 kg of books from France and a box full of stuffed animals from Germany. In Japan, I also bought many things at Asian grocery stores, recycle stores, Yahoo! Auctions, and Mercari, thinking that the more things I had, the richer the world of my works would become. After each solo exhibition, I would buy more things for the next production, and so on. As my opportunities to photograph things increased, so did my collection of photographs and objects. At first the characters were displayed on shelves, but eventually they overflowed and went into cardboard boxes, and eventually I moved them into translucent wardrobe cases for storage. After I got married, I became financially stable and began to buy things that I had previously hesitated to buy, but now I was buying them as an adult. My first child was stillborn, but I took a good picture of him with an IV needle in his arm with a medium format camera, and it became my collection. I have since had two more children and have continued to photograph them as well. Two years ago in mid-summer, I was setting up a small studio in an old apartment near my house. When I opened the front door for the first time in a while, there was a strong smell that I had never smelled before. When I opened the refrigerator, which was dripping brown liquid on the floor, I thought my eyes would burn from the ammonia. The refrigerator was broken, and about 30 animals of 10 different species, which had been frozen stiff in the freezer, were melting into mush. Even though they were dead, I felt sorry for myself for leaving them in the refrigerator for so long. Two years later, 60% of the freezer space in my regular refrigerator is occupied by animals waiting to be photographed, including a 1.5 kg piglet, two beautiful snakes I received, a chicken named Okazaki Ouhan, two degus, and ten hamsters. I am usually so busy with life that it takes a lot of energy to get started. The more I care about the motifs, the more I have to take careful pictures of them, and my body and head become rigid and immobile. How long will I let the animals sleep? But then a savior appeared to me. My children began to get involved in the production. It all started three years ago during a residency in Taiwan, when I asked the children to be my subjects in order to keep them occupied. Recently, they have also taken charge of collecting materials, finding insects, plants, dead sparrows, etc. and offering them to me. They have also been going through drawers full of knick-knacks, and even insisted on being photographed with the fur of a fox's face. When I asked him to let me do his makeup for a photo with the animals, he did it himself. They tolerate most things, so I let them hold the poisonous oleander (carefully using rubber gloves) and put hamsters and caterpillars on their faces. It is depressing but interesting to think that my children, too, take for granted an environment with plants, animals, and manufacturing, and that they will grow up in a way similar to mine, which is difficult for everyone to sympathize with. My studio is a tiny marvel of a room that took me a quarter of a century to build. 500 books, 1,000 different fabrics, 20 wardrobes full of bones and fossils. 500 books, 1000 kinds of cloth, 20 wardrobes full of bones, fossils, minerals, nuts and other natural objects, folk art, toys, stuffed animals, miniature people and other characters, 10 stuffed animals, plants and insects from my garden, small domesticated creatures, even my own children...? They make up my Wunderkammer, waiting for their cue to be photographed. （The other day, while taking down a heavy load on a shelf, I lost my balance on a stepladder and hit my head on the glass case of a stuffed goldeneye that sits in the middle of a small room. The glass stuck in his neck and he could have died. (He left behind a large number of motifs that could not be photographed and turned into ghosts without being able to float away...) In the past few years, I have been photographing more and more living creatures, and it is not enough for me to buy or catch small animals myself; I have to rent them from pet stores or ask people who have many living creatures to let me photograph them, and Wunderkammer is beginning to expand outside his studio. After taking photographs for so long, it has become difficult for me to remember all of the pictures I have taken. I am daily wandering lost in the collection of works of art that I have created, and I am almost drowning in it. Ever since my child was born, I have been at the mercy of my daily life, and with the recent increase in the number of plants and animals left behind by my father, I have been over-capacity and keep spilling something jabbering every day. However, I do not want to give up creating because of these factors, but rather, I want to involve all of them and somehow continue to add to my Wunderkammer collection while struggling to keep up. I would be very happy if the photographs that are the result of my efforts can be added to someone's Wunderkammer.
