detail of "Study of East" Drawing by fire

I am interested in the idea of the lines in between, especially the demarcations between the notion of east and west which often perceived as a polemical position. As a Japanese artist living and working in the “west”, the idea of tracing the deciduousness of this demarcation is not only theoretical but personal.

The comparative studies I am carrying out between old master’s skylines both from the eastern and the western traditions neither proves nor disproves the existence of this perceived demarcation, but rather questions about our pre-conception about our positioning within the spectrum between east and west. And I am doing this study through unconventional means, by fire, rather than normal drawing method. As I feel such a fleeting idea deserves vocabulary as ephemeral and yet as fundamental. I think there is something important the way image gets burned into the paper and becomes a part of the substance, rather than sitting on the surface like any other materials. And the fact the image contains a level of fragility and notion of death within it, I think is a fitting tool to dig at this idea.

The Image seen in my works are not made by the pigment sitting on the surface as of a conventional drawing, but by a technique normally associated with a secret correspondence in a past.Using fire, acid and water, the image was made as the integral part of the paper.

detail of " Between two continents .."

“ Between two continents and a half a millennia- Moran and Fan k’wan”

Drawing with fire, acid and water on paper
2009