Artworks

Tsurezuregusa (Essays in Idleness) No. 16, 1991

As I continued writing, the calligraphy of Essays in Idleness became more abstract, the entire text converging on the opening line, “As I casually jot down the trivial nonsense that comes to mind, it seems to me when those things come to me I feel even more crazy.”

The speed at which I wrote the strokes and characters and were closely bound to the shapes of the resulting characters. I tried to deconstruct and separate this natural connection between speed and character shape, and to then put them together again in a new way. Tsurezuregusa No. 11 was the result of trying to reproduce the character shapes of Tsurezuregusa No. 10, written by increasing my writing speed, by instead writing them at the slowest possible speed. After this work, my writing became even more “crazy.”

I had a piece of vellum paper measuring five feet by seven feet (147 x 209 cm) made especially for me, and rented a maisonette-style room for the purpose of creating the piece. After finishing a day’s work, I would look down intently from the second floor at the work on the floor below, imagining the next development. It took me six months to complete the piece. The work approached a world of subtle faint vibrations where the “desire to be crazy” was born. It is a work that is very dear to me.