I had a month-long residency with Room 68 in Provincetown, MA last spring and installed 60+ paper pulp mobiles at the end of my stay. I wanted to bring the light feeling that seems to live particular to a beach town (I grew up in a beach-town in Japan - a birth place of Japanese surfing / fishing town) with bright and cheerful colors and the buoyancy - the wire forms are the two-part egg-shaped “cookies” coming from the buoys I saw around the houses along the main street that runs parallel to the beach.

This was my first show in Philadelphia - the city I moved in in the 90’s when I left home in Japan. The place was run by then a recent art school grad named Will, who gave himself this space to run a gallery for three months for his own birthday. It was three-room space at the top of narrow stairs behind a door on the main room of the building in the historical old town Philly. When Will and I were installing this show a rain storm came through. It was early summer and we smelt the warm earth. I titled this show Petrichor.

This show titled Obscure Plant Club was shown at Tula, a plant shop in Brooklyn last February. The love for plants > want to know more > want to know the truth of them > a desire to dissect & examine > lab apparatus, beakers, specimen jars, combined with a sense of obsessive belonging shown through: embroidered trimmings and fringes, decorative edges & dreamy colors.

Squish. These ceramic stools are formed by being squished together when the clay is still supple and soft, taking forms from one another.

You See A Sheep: ceramic lamps

Possibly Tools: I made this ceramic work for the first design trade show I exhibited. They have functions, only as you could imagine. The idea is coming from the artifact displayed in Met, where the labels read “Possibly a handle for a water jug”, “possibly a toy”, and so on. Our imagination takes part in defining our fact.

Time Vessels: ceramic sculptures taking abstracted forms of human organs. They are time machine. We tell stories and through stories, we travel to the past and to the future, and elongate moments, against the natural flow of time.

Spore: ceramic lamp installation in a repurposed industrial meat cooler. The sensor detects when you open and enter into the space and actives the lamps which brighten up and flicker like candles.