Lace Curtains
DImensions Variable

A pair of curtains that fell, that are not functioning. They no longer show which side was inside, or outside.

Watercolor on Inkjet Print
Size: A4

I printed Matthew’s photograph using my inkjet printer. For me, he stayed somewhere between the real and the virtual, and if I printed the image out, it became a false image. It was like a photograph from a long time ago, with no relevance or persuasiveness. The watercolor was applied to the print, just like people painted black and photographs in the old time. As I put more watercolor, the likeliness appeared and disappeared. I didn’t wanted the image to be too far apart from what I know of him, so I stopped painting. However incomplete it is, the photograph seemed more real to me than the inkjet print did. Long long time later, when the ink fades away and water color stays, it may become a nice watercolor painting.

DVD Player, Monitor, Headphones, Bedsheets, Tent(Frame only)
Dimensions Variable

A video chat makes me feel weird. They are private but I constantly feel eavesdropped, my voice and video being scattered on the surface of internet. It is as if I am in a tent, and someone is looking at me from the outside.

Matthew called me in the late night in London. Which is the morning in Tokyo. I was still wrapped in blanket. I still didn’t have curtains, the morning light shining in and I couldn’t look him on the screen well. I covered my head and the computer with my blanket, like a tent, to see him better.

The tent is made of bed sheets. Inside, a video is showing him playing flute. But the monitor is inside, you can only see the blue light from outside, and can hear the faint sound coming from headphones, which are also inside. The image and sound are right there, but nothing is clear like shadows appear on the surface of a tent in the dark.

Torn postcard, paper clip, pin, glitters
Dimensions Variable

Exposed film cassette, fabric, fake flowers
Dimensions Variable

I sold the last one of the film camera I owned. I used to have several of them, but over the course of years, numbers have decreased, and now the last one is gone. Decided to sell the last one, I opened the back of the camera without knowing there was still a roll of film inside. The film was partially exposed, images were gone. I could not remember what I shot.

I also didn’t know anymore how to wind it; I carelessly pulled the roll out, causing the entire strip to come out of the cassette.

Now totally exposed, the film stayed on the corner of my table. I couldn’t throw it away. Somehow, it begun to function as a vase for the cheap fake flowers that were lying there for some time. They made a nice still life.

The strange fake flower arrangement sat on the table, reminding me of the memories that I can’t even remember. Memories that the light recorded and then erased quite plainly.

Colored pencil on paper, toy capsules
Dimensions Variable

I made up several treasure maps. Each map shows an ‘X’ to indicate some buried treasure, yet it is located inside the American military base in Okinawa. There aren’t any treasure there to begin with; it is impossible to go there and hide one secretly. There are those fences, and some people fear the unexploded shells still laying beneath the ground. A treasure that could have been hidden by someone there. Silly, innocent plays that have been taken away from the beginning.

Digital Prints, Photo Frames, Letter, Envelope, Bubble Wrap
Dimensions Variable（Photo Size：A3 x 2)

For a long while, I have been ignoring Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. This year, however, I decided to send them some gift. The mother’s day has passed already, and I didn’t like the idea of sending flowers, so I shot to photographs in time for the father’s day. One for my mother, one for my father. I called my mother and told her there’s some gift coming to her.

But I never sent them.

“What happened to the gift” my mother asked me a few month later. maybe later, I replied. There were so many things I needed to tell her, but everything got postponed again.

Pencil on Paper
Dimensions Variable

I decided to write an autobiography. But it’s been only 20-something years.

I tried to write down the oldest memories I could remember. There were some, but I was never sure if they are my own memories, or something that someone told me, or something I constructed from photographic memories. Maybe things gotten mixed up with stories and fictions I have read/saw in my life. I tried to undo the memories to weave out one coherent history. No matter how hard I tried, the time-line is confused, and new anecdotes pop up all the time, ones that I couldn’t connect to others, they stayed within me, while refusing to be a part of the whole.

The story got further and further away from the reality or what I thought to be real, and the writing turned into cheap melodrama. It was unoriginal and mediocre. Feeling stupid, I decided to make up an epilogue, a story that is a total fake, then let the wind take the entire story. The unnumbered pages, the fragments of my life, are scattered. If someone picks up a page and read a line or two, that would be nice.

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(at hiromiyoshii, October 10th – October 31st, 2009)

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