Message from Artist

ABOUT "ROME: FUTURE DEJA VU" AND THE BIRTH OF HASHIGRAPHY

"Rome wasn't built in a day" "All roads lead to Rome"... Because of its long and storied history, Rome is recognized as the spiritual home for many Europeans. Even for myself, born in Japan and having spent 40 years of my life in the U.S., experiencing the place that is considered by many to have been the origin of Western civilization, brings special emotions to my mind. There, you will find yourself feeling antiquity everywhere, and the thoughts and spirits of the people who used to live in Rome obviously still exist in the ancient buildings that Romans once built. “How many people were involved in the construction? How did they spend their time after they came home from work? They might have had a spouse; what were their ordinary lives with their families like? ” There are many who have enjoyed the wonderful feeling of being there, their imaginations of the past expanding.

As a photographer, I have been trying to express my works primarily within two different time-lines.

One time-line exists in the works called “Action Still Life” in which I explore and capture the "beauty of moments" with a realism that cannot be expressed by paintings, only by maximizing the advantages of photography. These are exemplified by the images of Still Life in action—moments that cannot be seen by human eyes, only to be captured by super high-speed strobe lights that flash at 1/100000 second or a millionth of a second. Imagine that the human lifespan is 100 years; it is still only a tiny fraction of the history of the earth, which is said to be 4.6 billions years, or even that of human history which is said to have started 4-5 million years ago. Relatively, from that perspective, the life of a single human is almost equivalent to the moment captured by super high-speed strobe lights within a single lifetime. Regardless of how finely it is captured, each moment is packed with countless dramas and incidents. The works of Action Still Life represent my passion for the “moment's eternity.”
HASHIGRAPHY represents another time-line. Conceptually based on the idea of "works discovered a thousand years from now", they are created with a mixture of photographic methods and painting techniques; it is an attempt to cross and compress a millennia, normally a long and barely comprehendible period of time. HASHIGRAPHY highlights the collaboration of time by showing works created in the “present” as if they were pieces from the “past” that are to be discovered in the “future” of a thousand years from now. By looking at the modern landscape from the perspective of a distant future, I hope that viewers will be reminded of the existence of a grand time-line, feeling an unexplainable sense of nostalgia, and an openness to an unknown world, enjoying the feeling of time slipping to a still unseen world.

The remains in Rome, where I took photographs to create my works this time, may be regarded as “artifacts from the past” within a certain perspective. However, it was not wholly my intention to capture these merely as photographs. Rather, peering through the viewfinder, I wanted to feel the thoughts and traces of the long-dead people who lived in the time when these buildings were not yet artifacts, and I wanted to capture this through the lens. The works also have as subjects many people living in the present time, who are connected with the spirit of the people of the past as well as a spirit of the people living in an undiscovered 31st C. In HASHIGRAPHY, I wanted to revive the passions and love of the people from the past who are the roots of those living today. In order to achieve this, I made an attempt to position the remains of the "past," through the people who live “now,” within a view of the “future” that only exists as a dream at present—all on an equal footing—and to express them in a singular vision of the world. I have created my works this time with the maxim, “Explore the romanticism of the past, capture our modern time, and commend to the future.”

From the HASHIGRAPHY BOOK entitled ROME: FUTURE DEJA VU (2009)