In Asian cultures death is not seen as negative, but as part of the continuum of life. For the last four years, I have been working on installations, two-dimensional mixed-media works, and sculptures that address issues related to cultural perceptions of life. In my work, I employ the repetitions of anatomical references and abstract elements along with people’s names taken from phone books to suggest the cycles of human lives and histories. I use fabric and thin Japanese paper, materials that recall the temporality and fragility of physical bodies. At the same time, the large scale of my work is intended to envelop the viewer. The size, the ethereal imagery, and the subtlety of the materials are meant to imply the existence of something beyond the physical body.

My eight years of experience working as a professional in the medical field in Japan, a Buddhist country, prompted many unanswered questions about the connections within the dualities of birth-death and mind-body.  At the same time, living in a modern society, it seems to me that people are more and more detached from a sense that human beings are a part of nature and eventually decay. My work—influenced by Asian funeral rituals, Buddhist philosophy, cosmology, and archaeology, as well as by my scientific knowledge—comes from my belief in the importance of accepting the end of life as a part of our life cycle.

I am interested in combining opposites and exploring the unity of physicality and spirituality as an indispensable aspect of human life. Life and death, appearance and disappearance, still and active, are among the dichotomies that inform my work. I present the structure of the world as a conjoined totality, evoking a spiritual quality beyond the materiality.