Baram

The only work I could do in a single room was painting on a flat surface. But I had never painted before, so all I could do was try different materials and gradually learn how to use them.

To become familiar with brushwork, I tore a sheet from a sketchbook every day, squeezed acrylic paint onto it, and brushed it across different areas. 

Before the paint had dried, I squeezed more paint on top and moved the brush again. Different colors mixed and spread, leaving lines behind. The studies made in this way lay scattered across the floor, eventually filling the entire room, and I had to organize them. Then one day, the studies covered with irregular forms began to look like the shape of wind. When I gathered the sheets scattered around the room and spread them irregularly across a canvas, the fragments of wind seemed to drift like actual wind, forming an irregular structure within the canvas.

The studies with irregular forms were, for me, a sign of anxiety and imperfection in painting. Yet that anxiety and imperfection formed a stable structure within the rectangle of the canvas. I came to understand the rectangle as a stable structure through my experiences in woodworking and on construction sites. In the past, I had installed temporary scaffolding so that workers could stand safely and work at height. Scaffolding is a layered structure made of rectangular forms, and it is one of the most basic and secure ways to build a temporary structure. Through this experience, I came to regard the rectangle as the most stable structure for supporting an unstable state. Perhaps stability is not a condition achieved by eliminating instability, but something that emerges when the unstable obtains a stable structure.

Over seven years, I arranged thousands of fragments of wind irregularly across more than 300 canvases, allowing stability and instability to coexist. Even through thousands of repeated actions, no two arrangements or fragments of wind were ever the same. Yet through this long repetition, the work gradually developed a stable system, and the irregular arrangements began to feel like a controlled disorder. I came to think that a stable system needs unstable elements.

One day, I had failed to seal a container of black water-based paint properly, and the original paint was beginning to dry. To restore its consistency, I added water, but I added too much. When I applied the thinned material and let it dry, the color I had thought of as black appeared as navy. With the thinned material, I could not be certain how the color would appear, and only after drying did its hidden color emerge faintly. That uncertainty brought a new instability into my work. Still, color does not carry symbolic meaning. It is closer to a visual element that creates balance together with form and arrangement.

Because the clarity of the line became uncertain with the thinned material, it became difficult to realize the rectangles in the same way as before. A new method was needed, one that was not based on irregular arrangement.

I began to think about the most minimal form that could suggest the movement of wind, and that form was the curve. I drew the thinned material directly across the surface. In this work, the color spread faintly and stretched into a curved form. It looked as if a trace of wind had been left behind within the surface. I found another form of wind, and I now work in two ways: the arrangement of rectangles and the faint curve.

Kiwa

Whenever I pick out timber at the sawmill, there is one thing I always check first: the two ends of the board — the end grain. Because the end grain is where moisture escapes, it bonds poorly when joined and cracks and warps easily, so it is often discarded. It is difficult to work with, so it is usually hidden inside the structure. But I use that discarded, hidden end grain.

The end grain is a cross-section where the growth rings are cut into a square. Its pattern shows how the tree grew — a one-of-a-kind record inscribed by nature. I thought its pattern was too distinctive and beautiful to be discarded and hidden.

After looking at the end grain for a long time, its pattern began to look like roof tiles layered one over another into a tiled roof. A single roof tile breaks easily, but stacked together they become a solid structure: a roof. The end grain was no different. I came to treat each piece of end grain as a single tile, and decided to stack and arrange them like a tiled roof into one complete form.

I cut timber of many species hundreds of times, and ran countless tests to keep the hundreds of end-grain pieces from warping. After a year and a half of trial and error, the finished work cracked and split from the dryness of winter, about two weeks before the exhibition. I should have repaired the cracked and broken parts, but I did not. I accepted what the wood had done on its own and let it show.

I had done so much to hide the imperfection of the end grain, yet the imperfection surfaced anyway. That experience changed how I think. Imperfection was not simply something to be removed or hidden. It, too, is an inherent quality of the object — its identity. I came to think that a complete form might not be one without flaws, but a structure that holds together while containing its imperfection, and I began to question whether a flawless, complete form exists at all.

From then on, what mattered to me was not turning something imperfect into something flawless, but leaving the imperfection within the structure of a single form, without removing it.