Dodo in Kanda festival, May, 2017 Painting

My work went through a lot of changes as I was living Japan Chiyoda residency again after leaving the New York residency in the US earlier this year. In the existing work, if I have shown images of the dodo birds that are simply hidden in the jungle, then in recent works in overseas residencies I tried collage work using locally available prints, or a combination of jungle I saw and dodo birds. ​ There is a big reason for this change in the working environment. Getting out of a familiar place and working in a strange place in another country was a big burden in many ways, but it seemed to give me an opportunity to try new things that I had not done before. As was done in the US, the most striking thing about walking in a strange city called Tokyo was signs of stores and roads written in Japanese. ​ A lot of letters that I can not understand as a foreigner have made me feel fresh fun. In addition, all of Japan's unique forms of buildings, subculture, prints, etc. have become a source of ideas for my work. The prints, such as newspapers and magazines, seemed especially interesting because they were showing the city's colorful features (things that would not have been easily accessible if they were just travelers who stays for a ). The place called city is where most modern people living in this age run their lives. Like many milestones and signs in cities, cities are places where people have different values and desires. ​ This landscape, therefore, felt like an exploration or adventure to me. I combined the image of the jungle with the landscape of cities, and I thought there was a point where the attributes of the jungle, such as the labyrinthine jungle, so dense enough to know what the threat was, came into contact with the city of modern society. Can people be confident that their desire is really a desire in the race of desire in a city like a huge jungle? Images in the work Dodo birds seen here and there are individuals who are wandering in modern society like this jungle. At the same time, it represents me who exists as an observer in an unfamiliar landscape.