Mineral
Abstract Matter
Mineral Series – Click Image for Details
This series depicts matter. Not matter that actually exists on Earth, however, but matter in an abstracted form.
Until now, I have painted light itself. In those works, the subject was a source that emitted its own light. What this series depicts is not a light source, but secondary light—light reflected off matter. Light acquires expression only when it touches the surface of matter. A wet surface glints sharply; a dry surface absorbs light; a coarse-grained surface scatters it finely. Differences in texture, the diversity of reflection. What appears there is an expression far more complex than that of the light source itself. I want to capture that moment.
What is depicted, however, is not any specific matter. Not rock, not ore, not water. It is matter that exists nowhere. And yet the matter within the picture has weight, has complex form, and shows movement. Cracking, corrosion, sedimentation, flow. The expression matter reveals over long stretches of time, and the expression light reveals for only an instant—the two meet within a single picture.
It is this expression, held by matter, that I wish to set down on the surface.
Water flows underground like a hidden vein of ore, invisible from the surface. Spray bursts against pale stone as sediment darkens below, momentarily revealing the unseen current.
伏流水 Subterranean Stream
Water sustains life. At Lourdes, France, spring water is famed for healing. This work evokes that energy: blue matter blooming through weathered green, lit within like a quiet pulse.
命の水 Water of Life
Water wells from between rocks—not the rock itself, but softness seeping from hardness. Cracked lime, moss stains, and gold frame an emergence the hard surface cannot restrain.
湧水 Spring Water
Across rust, umber, and burnt stone, a vein of water follows the land’s low places, trickling through cracks. Two temperatures, two speeds of time, meet on one surface.
水脈 Water Vein
Light reaches a surface as a shaft through fine particles, then scatters into countless points of grain. Not a vein of water, but of illumination, caught at the moment of touch.
光脈 Vein of Light
Water, or perhaps ice—something briefly formed is flowing. Horizontal streaks pull across the surface as light skims the current and darkens into depth, before the shape dissolves into flow.
流水 Flowing Water
Life emerges within the sea. Pale light gathers at the center as faint textures layer like sediment—primordial life before form. The series closes at its deepest source: matter awaiting shape.
原初の海 Primordial Sea
Light spills downward like spring water from an unseen source—perhaps a realm of light or another dimension. We see its descent illuminating turbulent matter around it.