My practice begins with the beauty that emerges when different things come into contact, act upon one another, and change through that encounter.

In my process, I project drawings with a projector and translate the projected images onto canvas with paint. The drawn image is first transformed into light and then reappears as matter. Rather than being transferred unchanged, the original image undergoes shifts and transformations as it passes through light, the body, and paint.

We, too, do not perceive the world or others directly as they are. We cannot, for example, become another person’s emotions or experiences themselves. Yet through language, facial expressions, the body, and memory, we recognize the presence of others and attempt to understand them. Even if we can never fully coincide with one another, we can still come into contact. Mediation does not eliminate the distance between things; it can also bring different things into contact while allowing that distance to remain.

In making my work, I do not determine the image solely through my own intention, but entrust part of the process to chance—the flow, bleeding, and overlapping of paint. I also reverse figure and ground, exchanging the positions of what draws and what is drawn. Just as a drawing is transferred into a painting through the mediation of light, an image I have determined is also transformed through contact with forces beyond my control.

The leaf-like and human-like forms that repeatedly appear in my work are connected to these concerns. A leaf is part of a plant, yet it separates from it, falls, overlaps with others, decays, and passes into another state. Human-like figures likewise appear not as clearly defined individuals, but as beings whose boundaries with plants, animals, and the surrounding space remain ambiguous. Rather than representing fixed meanings, I depict them as existing between distinctions such as self and other, human and nature, individual and environment.

To mediate something is not to transmit the original exactly as it was. Shifts and contingencies arise in the process; something may be lost, while something that did not exist before may emerge. We cannot fully coincide with what is different from ourselves. Even so, through various forms of mediation, we can come into contact with one another.

For me, painting is not a means of eliminating that distance. Different things remain different as they come into contact, and through that contact, they gradually change. I try to grasp what emerges within these transformations through painting.