Participated in Artist in Residence Program 2025 “CAMP”

I think that my father, who was a potter, had a big influence on me. I would often play around in his workshop when I was little. For as long as I can remember, I have insisted on doing things that set me apart from other people; that part of me remains as strong as ever. Even when it came to choosing a career path, I decided to go my own way. In my final year of senior high school, I suddenly decided I would try to enter an art university, and enrolled at Kyoto University of Art and Design (now Kyoto University of the Arts). I majored in ceramics, which I have to imagine was also due to my father’s influence, but that decision was not based on a determination to carry on his legacy. Rather, ceramics was the only art that I had any familiarity with. When I moved on to graduate school, I became interested in contemporary art. Feeling the constraints of producing art solely through the medium of ceramics, I began making photographic works. As a graduate student, I was close to KOMIYA Taro and TATEGAMI Kotaro who, along with the older artists around them, were a great influence on me. This was around the time when I first began thinking about making my living as an artist. The clear turning point was in 2014, when I held a solo exhibition at YEBISU ART LABO in Nagoya. The exhibition came about as the result of my being introduced to artist YAMASHITA Takuya, whose pep talks during the exhibition period helped me begin to develop a sense of myself as an artist. It was then that I decided that this would be my calling, even though I knew it would be a while before I could start earning money from it.

When I applied to the AIR programme, I was working full time, five days a week, for a photography company contracted with a wedding hall in Yokohama. I had always intended my working as a company employee to be a temporary arrangement, but I had to stay on in order to support my family as I prepared to go freelance. I was longing for the freedom to pursue my career as an artist, but my circumstances were such that I could not simply leave my job without some external impetus.
This was my situation when, in March 2025, right in the middle of the AIR application period, I decided to visit Aomori. I had already been wanting to see Choose Grief, an exhibition by TANINAKA Yuske at Towada Art Center, and I thought that I could check out ACAC while I was in the prefecture, so I applied for a guided tour there. It was a truly memorable day. I met HARADA Momomi – the curator who would later be assigned to me during my residency – for the first time, and she took me on a thorough tour of the facilities. I also ran into CHIBIGUTS and SHIKICHI Osamu, who both happened to be staying at ACAC at the time. Afterwards, I went to see the frost-covered “snow monster” trees in the Hakkoda Mountains, then rushed over to Sukayu Onsen for a quick dip before finally racing over to Towada City in my rental car. It is quite difficult for me to write proposals for residencies in places that I have never been to, so my overnight trip to Aomori was a crucial experience which allowed me to clear that hurdle.

In order to understand such a broad subject as ‘landscape’, I felt that I first had to go and make myself a part of the landscape itself, so I went on a trek around the Tsugaru Peninsula. As I walked around with the bare minimum of camping supplies on my back, experiencing the climate and people of the peninsula, I was not thinking about the landscape so much as my own ‘life’. Even in the midst of that landscape, I found myself intrigued by my own sense of being alive, and this realisation led me to the work I created for the residency.
In the statement which I included with my application documents, I had written that my creative process starts from what is happening in my life immediately before I begin creating. However, looking back, I do not think I really understood the meaning of those words when I wrote them. In fact, I had almost forgotten that I had written them at all. It was a fascinating and rewarding experience to feel my own words coming back to me through my actions, and to understand their meaning in a new light.

I think that I was able to build a good relationship with the other four artists participating in the residency. If I ever happen to be in their neighbourhood, I would like to get in touch and see them again. I sometimes found Asun [Adi Sundoro] working remotely on his jobs back home during the residency; we had a good time talking about our regular lives and work. While I did not feel any hesitation about chatting with the other artists after meals or getting to know them as we went about our business at ACAC and in Aomori City, I did feel that talking about each other’s work was somewhat difficult. I caught some glimpses of the others working, but I wish we had had more time to discuss our projects in detail. I am the type of person who gets nervous as my work reaches its climax, so I think that I ended up prioritising doing things at my own pace. It made me wonder if it might be a good idea to have some formalised parts within these programmes, such as having the resident artists all present to each other on their progress.

There were a lot of bear sightings last year, and I often had to keep a sharp lookout for them while I conducted my research. We were prohibited from going into the forest, even the parts within the ACAC grounds (which was a shame, the forest being such an important aspect of ACAC). However, my fear gradually faded as I came to realise that worrying about running into a bear would not make one suddenly appear (although you would not be wrong to call this overconfidence, since there is always a chance of running into a bear in those parts). During all that time I spent in the foothills of Tohoku – what you might call the ‘home turf’ of Japan’s bear population – I hardly saw anything resembling the region’s portrayal in the national media as a ‘bear heaven’ (or ‘bear hell’). I came to feel that there was no real point in constantly worrying about bears, since they were probably always around me every day, even if I could not see them.

In recent years, I have been thinking about ‘landscapes’ as I have been expanding on the theme of the ‘self-portrait’ in my works. During my residency, there were numerous occasions when my interest was drawn to subjects that I had not paid much attention to before, such as ‘living’ and ‘literature’. I even discovered some new perspectives with which to approach my work on ‘landscapes’, which I felt had reached a bit of a dead end. My performance was also very successful, as it gave a behind-the-scenes look at the locations that I had previously presented through photographs and videos. I had been planning to use the records and traces of that performance as the basis for an exhibition or some other format, but I was not able to get that far, so I want to keep developing it. But at the moment, I am working on publishing my first photography collection.

The AIR programme period was from September to December, but I stayed until mid-January, so I was at ACAC for about four months. I am glad that, by extending my stay, I could also experience the harshness of winter, which was totally different from the rich, comfortable atmosphere I experienced in the summer and fall. After going back and forth between Aomori and Kanagawa so many times, Aomori no longer seems like such a distant place. I would like to go back and do another Paid Residency at ACAC sooner or later. It was usually very quiet there, partly because the residency period coincided with ACAC’s renovation and closure to the public, which meant that there were never many people around, relative to the size of the facility. I prefer not to have visitors coming to my workspaces, so for me, it was a wonderful environment. (Personally, I hope that ACAC does not become much more popular than it is now.) That said, given the small number of staff tasked with managing such a large facility, some of the equipment was covered in dust after going unused for a long time. I was hoping that something more could be done about that, so I am very happy to hear that they are introducing a new ‘studio artist’ framework to bring more artists in during the year.

Translation: Ethan SAMES