For whatever reason, I find myself drawn to straight lines, or things that are linear. Every day, under the guise of study, I continue drawing straight lines, and at times I’ve created works focused entirely on them. It might seem obvious, but in the process, I realized that even the same thing can appear completely different simply by changing the angle or position from which it is viewed. Sometimes vertical, sometimes parallel, sometimes slanted. The straight line was fluid, as if it possessed an independent will. As I continued to engage with the straight line as an abstract entity devoid of meaning, I gradually began to think this way: By stripping meaning from things, might the form itself emerge more concretely?

With these thoughts in mind, I arranged the material at home and gazed at it daily. Though it was simply untouched material after being felled, its form was supple and beautiful. While its freshness had faded, I sensed vitality and strength in its linear shape. Thus, I decided to create a linear composition following the material’s form. The black composition in this work serves both to exclude meaning and to guide the viewer’s perspective. It is a modest manipulation born of personal observation, intended to reexamine the inherent beauty and strength of the form itself.

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Kozo is primarily used as raw material for Japanese paper. Since only the outer bark is used for paper, the core is often burnt as firewood. It seems to be excellent kindling, and I’ve even found it sold commercially for that purpose. The kozo core looks like something between a slender white wood and a branch, and it’s very beautiful. Above all, it possesses a simple, pleasing irregularity that makes you want to pick it up and wave it around. Initially, I wanted to somehow capture its presence on paper. I received handmade washi paper and charcoal pigment burned in the village, so I tried several sketches. Ultimately, however, I couldn’t resist touching it. In this work, I treated the kōzo itself as a paper-like base material and created drawings by burning its surface. For kozo, stripped of its outer bark—the raw material for paper—and often burned as firewood, this felt like a natural form of expression. (W.I.)