Rubble and the Shape of Prayer

The war in Ukraine, which began in 2022, has deeply influenced my work. And yet the installation I created (a work that composes an entire specific place or space as the piece itself) didn’t actually start there. When I search my heart more deeply, I think its true starting point was the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011.

Even before that, there had been many moments of thinking, "Why could this happen?" But once I was watching the live footage of the tsunami swallowing towns, people, fields, and mountains in Tōhoku, and the mountains of rubble left behind after the water receded, that image never faded from my heart. Even now when I write or re-read my writing, it brings tears to my eyes.

It took a long time before I could face that emotion and actually go to the site myself. And even after I was finally taken there, I couldn’t erase the sound of something breaking apart that filled my heart.

At the same time, that rubble had to be "removed" — cleared away out of necessity. I just stood and cried. I think the particular feelings born from that became the starting point of my series of works regarding the shape of rubble and prayer — works I’ve been making here in Vancouver.

Pressing In Like Black Oil

Then there’s Gaza, what is currently happening in the country next door (the US), what is happening in the Middle East — the daily news of it all. The precariousness of this world presses in on my heart like the black oil that spills out when a tanker runs aground. No matter how much I try to push it away, I’m overwhelmed by the black smoke and stench until I have no words left.

That overwhelming sense of human sin's ugliness — thick, sticky, clinging, and impossible to shake off — has increasingly brought on something like a sense of defeat, a despair. Perhaps because of this, I began to hesitate to use "colour," something that has always mattered deeply to me in my work.

Confronting the Thick Black Feeling

I came to feel as though using warm, vivid colours would be a kind of lie. The excitement I always used to feel when choosing colours for my threads disappeared. So I decided instead to confront this thick, black feeling that was overwhelming me — to express what I was actually feeling. It was then that words from the Bible, "put on sackcloth," rose up in my heart.

There are countless names for colours. That is only possible because the human eye can perceive subtle differences between them. Colour is a phenomenon that occurs when light is refracted, but how a gradation is perceived and named depends on many conditions — the latitude and humidity of where people live, the colour of their eyes, their culture, and so on.

Japanese, too, has many beautiful names for colours. We speak of "red" or "blue" as though each were a single colour, but within each of those colours lie countless gradations, each with its own name.

Even the colour "black" is recognized through many different names for its gradations. (Incidentally, black is not, strictly speaking, a "colour" at all — but I’ll save that for another time.)

Black Made From Acorns 黒橡

The title this time, kurotsurubami (黒橡), refers to a colour dyed using acorns, said to have been used for mourning clothes in ancient times. I wove three panels of cloth, three meters each, using jute hemp for the black warp threads — and this is precisely my expression of mourning attire. Using my body more than usual, working with the same colour for long stretches of time, weaving on quietly and steadily — the act itself closely mirrors the state of being "in mourning."

The work of expressing what lies within is, in a sense, painful, but at the same time it is also the work of tidying a cluttered room. And with each panel I finish weaving, I feel as though I’ve finally managed to touch, if only slightly, feelings that had until now been impossible to grasp.

I once said that "people cannot escape from making." To "make" is to "express" — and perhaps that is something like cell walls forming within a vague, formless feeling, so that each part can begin to function on its own.

When I told my friends about the exhibition I did, many of them said, "I envy you." Everyone is living day to day with the same sense of helplessness. An anxiety about where this world is headed, a wondering about what God is doing right now — "These days have become exactly the kind that the word 'lament' fits," they say.

The Artist's Calling

"But I don’t know how to face it. I can’t seem to give shape to the turmoil inside me that I can’t fully hold." That’s what they say. And even though they’ve prayed, even though they thought they had laid that burden at the foot of the cross, it rises up again and covers their heart...

They say they’re tired of that cycle repeating, worn down by it. They ask themselves, "Is my faith too weak, that I can’t let go of this even through journaling, even through prayer?"

During the Christmas break, George Orwell’s 1984 was sold out at every bookstore I checked in Vancouver. Perhaps that’s because so many people are feeling the same sense of crisis. Maybe people want to find, even by borrowing someone else’s words, a place to land for feelings they can’t quite put into words themselves.

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I think one of an artist's callings might be to build a gate through which to confront something ungraspable. It's a yearning to touch the fingertip of the Creator God, and at the same time, an almost frightening pressure — the sense that what has filled the heart must be given form — that drives one to create as if pushed from behind.

That pressure feels almost like being seized by a ghost. And I wonder whether the calling to create might not be only for oneself — whether God might want someone else to encounter that "word" through it.

I find myself with a faint hope: that if we can wear kurotsurubami together in that same space and grieve together, perhaps something will be born there.