A work that depicts a romance between humans and technology as a performance installation. Humans and technology (a skin-colored gorilla) attempt to become one through “skin garments.” Technology turns its thoughts to the finite twilight that humans possess, while humans gaze toward the infinite galaxy that technology possesses. Whether they are embracing each other or restraining each other, both are drowning in a sea of intimate distance. Humans are addicted to technology, and at the same time, technology is also addicted to humans. While loving technology, how can we also love humans? By finding an intermediate zone between pleasure and despair, I want to project it onto the sexuality of us humans living in the present.

In this work, the viewer sequentially inhabits various characters (avatars) living in a room within a spacious apartment building, inside a virtual space. The person playing music, the person watering flowers, and the people having conversations do not interact with one another, as if each were living in a separate reality. Experiencing the reality of each character (avatar), who inhabit the same space yet never cross paths, through VR is frustrating because you cannot control the avatars’ movements, while at the same time it feels intensely real. In the end, there is a twist in which you are possessed by another avatar, reminding you that you are not always the center of the world, and that you too are someone else’s other.

In this work, the VR participant is exhibited in the venue as a “sculptural work.” The viewer wears a VR headset and a full set of VR walking apparatus (Virtuix Omni) mounted on a pedestal, and experiences the work while holding a gun-shaped controller. This shooting-game-style piece allows the viewer to shoot a gun to gradually open up their field of vision and acquire the scenery before them. Toward the end of the experience, a treasure chest appears deep inside the museum; when it is opened, the Medusa painted by Caravaggio leaps out. The viewer, gazed upon by Medusa, is turned into a stone statue, and the experience ends with them displayed on a pedestal as one of the museum’s exhibits. This work does not merely invite participation in a game, but turns the very situation of viewing a VR work into the work itself.

An exhibition created with inspiration from manga artist Daijiro Morohoshi’s “Kaokaosama ga Toru.” From questions about the boundary between the self and the world, and how others perceive the existence of someone other than themselves, the exhibition brought together works that express, in various forms, the skin that can be seen by others as the very identity of that existence. It is an installation in which a video showing diverse skins layering over an object molded from the artist’s own face like a liquid, a sculpture in which the upper and lower halves of a torso are separated and face one another, a novel about an imaginary sister, and a performance by the artist are all merged into one. These ideas stem from a reactive obsession with skin and the body that arose while the pandemic had yet to come to an end.