This video work is an attempt to speak, through the medium of film, to the ambiguity and beauty held within the word “desire.” Aisho Nakajima’s GANGBANG is not mere provocation, but an anthem to the moments where human instinct and intimacy intersect, and I sought to depict it as a “visual orchestra.” The stage is a sealed, sensual room where shadow and light intertwine. There, the boundaries of gender and identity dissolve, and kisses and embraces emerge as a single fluid language. As the 360-degree rotating camera slowly traverses the space, the audience is led not into the feeling of “peeking” into this world, but into the sensation of “being there together.” What matters is not the correctness of the gaze, but the honesty of sensation. The extensive use of close-ups brings into focus the air drifting between bodies and the fragility that resides in exchanged glances. The lighting is pared down to the extreme, quietly illuminating the contours of the skin and the rhythm of breath. The shadows themselves become the blank space of desire. GANGBANG is a visual poem that affirms someone’s sexual being as sensual beauty. It is political, and at the same time deeply personal. By hovering on the knife-edge between “showing” and “making one feel,” this work once again asks what it means for us to “connect.”

“Running water never stops and never remains the same. Bubbles floating in the pools, now vanishing, now forming, never stay long. People and their dwellings in this world are likewise...” Calligrapher Mariko Kinoshita selected and inscribed a passage from Kamo no Chomei’s Hojoki, then divided the calligraphy into square pieces herself. Based on these segmented cells, video artist Shinichi Yamamoto assigned a time axis, and musician Corey Fuller further created a video work built from sound that deconstructed and reconstructed the words of Hojoki. In the video production method, using a technique Yamamoto often employs, he creates a system (equation) that randomly offsets the timing of the segmented characters, substitutes the cell materials into it, and, inspired by the unexpected and accidental patterns that emerge, feeds them back in again and edits them frame by frame to give them a time axis. This time, in the musical process as well, in addition to instruments such as the piano, an attempt was made to record footage of Kinoshita reciting Hojoki, deconstruct it, and use it as audio source material. With Kinoshita’s concepts of emptiness and dependent origination in her calligraphic practice, Corey Fuller’s richly quiet ambient textures, and Shinichi Yamamoto’s meta perspective when viewing landscapes in his works, each artist’s worldview is brought together in collaboration, with Hojoki as the point of intersection. The central theme is the “universal” that is felt even while always observing the “ever-changing.” After being presented on four outdoor screens in Shinjuku as part of the Shinjuku Creators Festa, the project has continued to evolve as an ongoing collaboration, including the development of an immersive installation version at Haneda Airport as part of the Agency for Cultural Affairs’ “Media Art × Cultural Resources: Distributed Museum” initiative.

Opening movie for the smartphone game app Break My Case. Featuring the motifs of “the lights of a city shining at night” and “threads weaving destiny,” it expresses an urban, stylish world.