Statement (EN)

Perhaps I have always lived with a quiet attentiveness to what does not fully emerge.
The pain behind anger, the silent cry expressed through self-harm, the things that sink into shadows and go unnoticed. I find myself drawn to them, not to explain or to represent, but to imagine, to reach gently toward them. They exist in others, and in myself. I try to witness them, to remain beside them, refusing to forget or render them invisible.

Painting, for me, is not a way to assert the self. It may be a way to move beyond the self and respond by simply being present with silence and absence. There have been times, in America, when I was treated as invisible, reduced to the role of an Asian woman. And in Japan, I experienced an atmosphere where speaking up was quietly discouraged, where silence felt like the only option. These experiences left deep impressions on my body: a layered sense of having not been seen, not been heard.

My lines are not meant to speak for, but to stand beside what could not be spoken. I paint not to claim, but to coexist. I do not trace the surface of representations or symbols; I draw to touch what lies behind them—the absences, the wounds, the lingering presences we call kéhai in Japanese: a subtle trace of something or someone that is no longer here, but still deeply felt. A painting, to me, is not something I make. It is a trace the world leaves through me.

This approach resonates with several thinkers.
Kiyoshi Miki saw ethics not as abstract correctness but as response born within relationship and believed that silence, too, could be a form of reply. For him, poetry was not a solitary act, but a form that creates resonance between “self” and “other”, a space where multiple existences meet and echo. This is how I understand the act of drawing a line.
Carol Gilligan’s ethics of care values not universal judgment but listening within particular, fragile relationships. Ethics, in her view, begins with the act of turning one’s attention toward what was never allowed to speak. My work, in its quiet gaze and attention to what is unseen, is deeply shaped by this ethical stance.

My practice is grounded in East Asian sensibilities of non-substantiality and interrelation. It is a contemporary form of response that asks not only how we speak, but how we remain beside what cannot. In a world that lifts only the loudest voices, I try to value the imagination that listens to silence. To speak as a question rather than a claim. To leave space for what has been forgotten to be quietly held once more.

I question not to possess answers, but because questioning itself is a form of prayer. My questions take shape through art: lines, colors, absences, silences. These are not explanations, but ways of sensing, of practicing attention without domination.
Art is a way of reaching toward what cannot be seen—a gesture not of possession, but of responsiveness itself. It is not a voice of representation, but an ethical stance that quietly says: I see you. I hear you.
A fragile, persistent form of care that resists forgetting.
To question is to pray. And I paint as I question, question as I paint.

This is what art means to me.