Mado: The Window Mereology
Since 2011, I have been working on building "Mado: The Window Mereology" which is my window painting series that looks into interior spaces. I was always intrigued by the idea of windows in our daily life. A window is not just the most fragile opening of a building but also it symbolises human nature. My interest in windows grew significantly when I moved to the United States in 2011 and saw windows that were totally different from what I used to know in my homeland. Window became a unique subject to me when I realized that a window changes depending on the places, but it always captures, displays, and mirrors the habits, behaviors and curiosity of humans.There is something about ourselves that we can only see from places like outside the window where we cannot fully control the environment. It is like a fish tank where we arrange plants and all but once fishes reside, we have only partial control of the environment.
In my heart, there is a helpless longing for family and a sense of homesickness to a home that is not present. There are many problems I encountered growing up in Japan, and many of them seemed to me to happen because of my gender or age, and or culture or traditions we embraced. And most of the problems there I couldn’t solve and so did others. As a child, there was no choice but I had to live with the difficulties, if not giving up life itself. Everything has different faces, even good things can cause negative effects sometimes. Rather than sharing personal raw experiences, I want to approach the fundamental structure of society with my art. As a Japanese artist who is proud of my own background, I am manifesting for a change from the outside. There are sadness, anger, and questions to the people, society, my family, and to myself that I still carry, and I want to make use of them rather than abandoning them. Moving outside also made me realize that some problems are universally present while others are specific to a region or a community. As I mature, my windows are evolving both more deep and personal, and something much bigger and universal. No matter who we lose or how difficult things are or what happened in the past, we must keep living. There is something about kinfolks, the unique feeling we hold to them no matter if it's a positive or a negative relationship, or both. One of the goals with this window series is perhaps to reflect this delicate part of ourselves for us to see because not always we can have a glance at it in a real window.
In reality, we are part of what we see. Each of us affects the world to look like what it looks like today. What we can see “outside” is also about each of us and part of us, but our awareness is so limited and we are only barely aware of the world we are born, raised and keep living in right now. A window is a good visible example of a border. A window is a connection between inside to outside, one to another, you and me. Do the “sides” really exist, or do they exist only in our minds? A window connects and separates space simultaneously, and it only depends on how we understand the space. What if we can practice to see that everything is happening in one place through my work, I wonder. Even if we are not aware about everything that is happening, we are affected by it, and we are affecting it to be happening. A small unseen personal act influences the collective whole. We all know that sunlight from a window enables interior plants to grow.
In my heart, there is a helpless longing for family and a sense of homesickness to a home that is not present. There are many problems I encountered growing up in Japan, and many of them seemed to me to happen because of my gender or age, and or culture or traditions we embraced. And most of the problems there I couldn’t solve and so did others. As a child, there was no choice but I had to live with the difficulties, if not giving up life itself. Everything has different faces, even good things can cause negative effects sometimes. Rather than sharing personal raw experiences, I want to approach the fundamental structure of society with my art. As a Japanese artist who is proud of my own background, I am manifesting for a change from the outside. There are sadness, anger, and questions to the people, society, my family, and to myself that I still carry, and I want to make use of them rather than abandoning them. Moving outside also made me realize that some problems are universally present while others are specific to a region or a community. As I mature, my windows are evolving both more deep and personal, and something much bigger and universal. No matter who we lose or how difficult things are or what happened in the past, we must keep living. There is something about kinfolks, the unique feeling we hold to them no matter if it's a positive or a negative relationship, or both. One of the goals with this window series is perhaps to reflect this delicate part of ourselves for us to see because not always we can have a glance at it in a real window.
In reality, we are part of what we see. Each of us affects the world to look like what it looks like today. What we can see “outside” is also about each of us and part of us, but our awareness is so limited and we are only barely aware of the world we are born, raised and keep living in right now. A window is a good visible example of a border. A window is a connection between inside to outside, one to another, you and me. Do the “sides” really exist, or do they exist only in our minds? A window connects and separates space simultaneously, and it only depends on how we understand the space. What if we can practice to see that everything is happening in one place through my work, I wonder. Even if we are not aware about everything that is happening, we are affected by it, and we are affecting it to be happening. A small unseen personal act influences the collective whole. We all know that sunlight from a window enables interior plants to grow.
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