Piece concept (comment from the artist at the time of selection)

"Where do our memories go?" I think this question can offer a connection from the past to the future. For this project, I use the color extracted from plants as my motif. Color is treated today as codes of information, such as in the color systems, RGB and CMYK, but in ancient times, plants and color went hand in hand and had their own particular relationship with one another. For example, the color red was represented by the madder plant and blue by the indigo plant. Based on accounts handed down from the past, the act of extracting color from plants existed as the foundation of offering prayers to nature, and it was believed an echo of the plant's spirit dwelled within that extracted color. The piece for this exhibition uses the liquid extraction from madder harvested in Japan. Pigment from madder has been found in clothing from the Yayoi period in Japanese history and was later written about in the ancient Japanese texts, the Kojiki and Man'yoshu. Its role as various symbols has changed through the shifting eras up to the Meiji period. The title, beclouded, becalmed, belighted, holds the meaning of purifying colors from those encoded in swamps and rebuilding a connection we had lost to the spirit of plants.

Piece introduction

Color isn't just a physical or sensory phenomenon, but something that was offered as a prayer to the laws of nature by peoples since antiquity. Strings hanging down from the ceiling are soaked with the liquid extract from Japanese madder, once used in the national flag of Japan, as it drifts through the air. The workings of nature interact with the rhythm of machines in the space, connecting with one another to a point which no one can say.

Piece introduction video