This work was exhibited at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum as a selected work for the 88th Wangen Exhibition.
Since the theme was "fire," I tried to expand my own imagination. The title of the work, "Hara-zo" (original image), means an original landscape related to fire. It is impossible to imagine what the landscape looked like when man first lit up the darkness of the night with fire in ancient times. However, the fact that he intentionally lit up the night means that there must have been a process of predicting the outcome before he did so. Before that, of course, he would have seen flames floating in the darkness of the night in his experience of natural phenomena. Nevertheless, when one intends to light the night, various emotions, such as anticipation, the expectation of warmth, the expectation of freedom from fear, and so on, intervene, and the preconceived image of a bright night becomes a thing of the past, and a new image of night is formed. Even today, we can easily imagine how vivid the experience is when stereotypes are overturned. The "Original Image" is my own personal, completely imaginary recreation of the night as a mental landscape that would remain in the mind of a human being for the rest of his life, at the moment when he embarked on a new history.
I created vivid colors by applying a UV print with white ink removed to the back of an acrylic board and laying a sheet of gold-colored drawing paper to allow it to shine through.
