The Wall began in New York in the summer of 2014, during my residency and the exhibition *AfterImage*. At the time, I started to pay more attention to surfaces—the boundaries between people and the surfaces of things. A wall is also a surface. I also became interested in the disappearance of a surface, and in the possibility of moving beyond certain patterns of thinking or fixed mindsets.
The installation brought together traces of pigments, paintings, frames, layered images, moving images, and *Missing Artworks*, an experiment I developed in New York. Through these different works, I was dealing with one central idea: process.
People often ask me what kind of art I make. I always say I’m not sure. I think it is good for me to remain open to new and unfamiliar things passing through my mind. I want to stay within this kind of process. To me, uncertainty is an important part of the creative situation. When I move through these processes and look back, I find that I have already made quite a lot of paintings.
PAINTINGS
I like to describe these paintings as “fragments.” It doesn’t mean that they are garbage, but that they are beautiful pieces that emerge from a creative process.
It is difficult for me to discuss the value of these pieces. On one hand, these fragments are like death to me. On the other hand, if another person’s eyes are drawn to them and a new gaze is formed, it is like a rebirth.
This has always been a paradox for me. It is the surface of this paradox, and the process itself, that draws my attention.
LAYERS OF IMAGES
When I cut through a painting, it becomes part of a process—a base for the next work. It could be like a pre-imagination, or even a prejudice toward something.
When I open up a painting in this way, there is a larger space and a slower process of looking. I try to stay somewhere between different thoughts, to stop and look again.
It is also about possibility. I sometimes think that art needs to pursue as many possibilities as possible. In two-dimensional work, removing lines and colors can sometimes create more possibilities. But even the texture or whiteness of the paper might mask certain possibilities. By removing parts of the paper itself, another space can appear.
I cut through these images to move beyond what I can already imagine. I don’t know what I will encounter when I go through.
FRAME
The frame comes from the same idea. A frame sets a scope for our view; what lies within it is what we see.
If I need to give a short explanation of this work, I sometimes say that the frame is like our brain, and that I depict the ideas and images that pass through it. But I know that this is still not exactly what I want to say. The frame is not necessarily our brain, but rather a field or space for viewing.
The whole piece can be understood as expressing the process of watching.
What is your understanding of structure? For me, it might be these frameworks for viewing. Through accumulation, everyone develops their own perspective, personality, and habits. Through a similar process, society develops its customs and rules.
I think of these different frameworks, or traces of viewing, as structures. They are like the support structures behind a wall. Most of the time, we see only the surface of the wall, without being aware of what supports it from behind.
MOVING IMAGES
For the videos I make, I prefer to call them “moving images.”
My initial reason for making moving images was to depict subtle things. I wanted to express a little more than the form of a single painting could convey. Sometimes it is these tiny differences that bring us closer to expressing something abstract.
To me, moving images are more like a gentle sway of time, through which we have a chance to take another look at simple things in life. Within the space created by this sway, we extend the amount of time we normally spend looking and examine these things again.
Everyone—from the audience to myself—is involved in this process of watching.
I also call these works “moving images” because the image that emerges from the production process contains multiple layers and traces of that process. It is an image made from fragments.
When I am making a work, there is usually too much for me to think about, and my mind is too occupied to know what will happen next. When we pay attention to human interaction, we tend to overlook the interactions between other things.
Conventional video recording can capture details that can later be observed repeatedly. The moving images I create, however, are records of a process of watching. I have to see something in the moment of watching and then present it. The final work therefore contains traces of what was seen during that process.
In this sense, these moving images are a form of gaze.
THE WALL
All these processes of layering lead toward one thing: the disappearance of the interface.
The disappearance of the interface is not about tearing down the wall, but about walking into the wall.
The layered walls allow the viewer to enter the wall and look between its surfaces. When this happens, we ourselves become part of the process.
To step outside the frame is not simply to stand on the other side of the wall. It is to enter the space within the wall, between its surfaces, before eventually detaching from it.