Artist Statement

Tracing the Flood

In autumn 2022, three years after Typhoon Hagibis, I walked along a riverbank during my first trip to Daigo. There were gaps among the houses. On the ground, amid the bathroom tiles that remained, a flower someone had planted seemed to bloom like it was performing a requiem rite, and I recalled what I’d been told by the sea in Sendai: This site is a ruin, not a vacant lot.

If time and memory layer up like geological strata, then a calamity connects the before and after of a change in strata color. Given that my visit coincided with the typhoon season, I was uncertain how to ask people about their memories of the flooding, but doing so revealed that those who spoke to me were similarly feeling their way through this process. “When there’s a flood, the subsequent lives of the people who live by the river and those who live on high ground are totally different,” someone told me, their voice interwoven with consideration for the people who live in the same place. I followed behind a person who retraced their steps, as if the immediate post-flood and current landscapes overlapped in their mind, and realized I was attending a moment of closure for them, of finding a place to deposit their feelings three years on.

On the evening of a very rainy day, people in the neighborhood gathered to watch the turbid waters. “The clouds on the mountains are thin. It’ll let up soon.” “Three years ago, the water started to overflow the other bank and flooded on this side too.” The vista from that time goes around and around the long-term residents’ bodies with their insights and intuition. “You’ll sleep well tonight. Keep an ear out for water running off the back of the mountain.” Their words calmed my noisy mind. The mountain, misty in the rain, was beautiful.

At the exhibition marking the end of my residency, I created a space with photo albums recording the typhoon that I borrowed from a Daigo photographer, and at which a girl who said she had moved to the area after the typhoon gazed for a long time. The paintings I make from the voices of the people appear slowly and belatedly. I layer up the colors, trying to imagine the paintings that could form a weld like those photo albums.