Commentary: Before COVID, even a few years earlier, around the time when people had become nervously hypersensitive in times of emergency, there was already a sense of suffocation, as if only things that were useful or meaningful were being demanded, and it felt as though that atmosphere had been cultivated after COVID began. As we were forced to relearn that no one had knowledge of this unknown virus, and that people held different ideas and opinions about how to deal with it, I imagined a sense of futility and of coexisting with various forms of life, drawn from the parallel between having no choice but to barricade ourselves in and the fact that everything is always passing. The track “The FOG” itself is by John Carpenter, but I think it also referenced films such as Fitzcarraldo, Straw Dogs, and The Wages of Fear.

This work was created for an exhibition at “La Samaritaine,” a long-established Parisian department store founded in 1869. Taking the Zen phrase “Fūkō Hibi Arata” as its keyword, and with the theme of the ever-shifting everyday in reality and the virtual, it was presented as a symbolic work for an exhibition that reinterprets Art Nouveau in the present day. The peacock depicted here is based on an Art Nouveau fresco painted across the entire uppermost level of the atrium at La Samaritaine. Through “raster scroll,” a technique used in side-scrolling video games, it was transformed into an animation of pixelated nature in which no frame is ever the same. It presents the beauty of a new nature in the contemporary world where reality and the virtual overlap, as well as a new abundance for humankind that lives in harmony with it. The pixelated plants may wither, yet they bloom with new flowers.

Commercial for the used car dealer FATE. It depicts stories involving cars using animation. Various car models were filmed in a warehouse, while the people and backgrounds were expressed through rotoscoping. By adding animation to the people and backgrounds, each situation is given movement and memories are brought to life. Produced with Photoshop and After Effects.