DOH ART ARCHIVE

1984, 49.5 × 72.5 cm.

Across a black background, layered bands of blue, violet, green, red, and other colors move, change direction, and intersect. At first, just as the title suggests, the colors seem to be taking a walk through the image.

But the black background begins to bother me. What would this work look like if all this black were replaced by white? Black has no complementary color. Here I consider white as a color for comparison. Replacing the background with white makes the work look almost like a textile used on the wall of a modern café. If I also replace the colors of the straight lines and geometric forms with their respective complementary colors, I can even imagine a textile in futuristic colors.

At the same time, I recall the use of empty space in Japanese art. Armor and swords, architectural ornament, metal engraving. As I look while imagining these changes of color, those memories also begin to connect within me.

Are we looking at works through common sense, rules, and fixed ideas? Reversing familiar colors and backgrounds may allow us to step a little outside that way of seeing. Where does freedom originate? And how do we recognize our own individuality?

Black and white. At first I am tempted to make a simple contrast: something exists in black, while nothing exists in white. But is that really so?

Black is dark and cannot be seen through, so I feel anxiety toward the unknown.

White, by contrast, is bright and seems like a possibility upon which nothing has yet been drawn, so I feel hope toward the unknown. Yet when I think more carefully, are black and white not alike in one respect—that both contain what I am not yet able to perceive?

There may be something in black that I cannot see. White, too, may not be empty; something may exist there that I simply cannot yet see. The moment I think this, black and white, which had seemed opposites, begin to approach each other at their roots.

Here the idea of reversal becomes stronger. Reverse black into white. Reverse the one who sees and the one who is seen. Reverse even the direction of time.

What would the present look like if viewed from ancient times? If the future looked back at the present, how would the things we now consider “correct”

appear?

I return to the word promenade. To take a walk is not to stand at one point and make a final judgment about the world. When I walk, my position changes.

When my position changes, the light changes. When the light changes, color changes as well. The same thing can show a different face when viewed from another direction.

Thinking this way, the work begins to seem not merely a promenade of colors, but a promenade through my own perception.

Black still feels like anxiety, and white like hope. Yet both contain “what has not yet become visible.” The thought born here will return to me repeatedly when I encounter black and white spaces in later works.

1982, 49.5 × 72.5 cm.

At first I see a semi-abstract still life. In a dark reddish-purple space are a vase, flowers, three cherries, and a board-like structure. Since this is a still life, I assume I only need to look at the objects placed there.

But when I shine light on the work in order to examine it, extremely fine lines that I had hardly been able to perceive suddenly appear. They seem even finer than a human hair.

What are they?

For the moment, I follow them as if they were light. A line traveling straight from the right strikes the board and refracts irregularly. When it touches the flowers, it changes into a soft wave. On the cylindrical vase it curves as though sliding along the surface, and afterward returns to a straight line.

What seems to be the same line changes its appearance according to the material it encounters. If it is light, perhaps the artist is depicting not the objects themselves so much as the changes that occur when objects and light meet.

Yet two lines above, which do not collide with the board, continue straight and become invisible near the left side. Have they disappeared? No—perhaps they have merely ceased to be visible. From the faint traces that remain, I can only imagine what lies beyond.

Again the question arises: are “not visible” and “not existing” really the same thing?

There are also faint lines that seem to enter from outside the image. Light arriving from the universe? Something like elementary particles? Something appearing across dimensions? Perhaps that is too great a leap. I therefore leave this as a question rather than an answer.

Then I return to the cherries. Real cherries are round, and no two are exactly alike. Yet here they have been pressed into artificial, cube-like forms. The two on the right seem to have toppled over, and yet they remain somehow neatly behaved and stable.

Why has a natural fruit been made to obey a geometric order created by human beings? I feel here “nature made to obey human rules.”

But cherries contain seeds. The flesh may be eaten and disappear, yet within the seed remains the possibility of another life. Even if human beings shape, classify, and press nature into systems of order, something within life continues toward what comes next. In the seed, I feel hope.

The fact that the title is not simply Still Life but Still Life (Cherries) also catches my attention. The work is supposed to depict motionless objects, yet light moves and continues into what cannot be seen, while inside the fruit is a seed connected to future life. Time and life are hidden within what appears to be a quiet still life.

At first I was looking at objects that had been placed before me. Discovering the extremely fine lines led me to the relationship between matter and light, then to what cannot be seen, and finally from the cherry seeds to future life. I am surprised by how many invisible things can lie hidden within an ordinary still life.

1982, 38 × 56.5 cm. This work is in my collection.

Regarding the title, I remember that the artist explained “the flow of spacetime” as ayumi—progress or movement—and that the kanji 亜由美 were applied to that sound. For that reason, I want to be cautious about entering the work by assuming that the title is simply a woman’s name.

Within a restrained gray space, paper-thin planes are layered one after another.

One plane alone is close to white. A rainbow line runs across the upper part of the image.

At first, I see the planes as rising. Each is a two-dimensional surface. As they gradually stand up, depth suddenly appears. Is this the instant in which two dimensions are trying to acquire three-dimensional space?

Just as I think this, the opposite direction begins to bother me.

Are they really rising? Could planes that were already upright instead be falling under gravity and returning once more to flatness?

Rising or falling?

Is space being born from a plane? Or is space being lost as it returns to a plane?

The work does not decide the direction for me.

I try assuming that the single nearly white plane is the “present.” The planes before and behind it then seem like past and future. But which side is the past, and which is the future? If I reverse my gaze, the direction of time reverses just as easily.

Can the rainbow line above simply be called an arrow indicating the direction of time? In other works, changes in color can produce readings in the opposite direction. Perhaps the line is not there to tell me the direction at all, but to make me ask, “Are you sure that is the right direction?”

If the ayumi of the title is understood as the progress of time, then progress may not always mean moving forward. Generation and disappearance. Rising and falling. Two dimensions and three. Past and future. They exchange places depending on the position from which they are viewed.

At first I saw a movement of rising. But when I reversed my own reading, time within the work ceased to flow in only one direction. I want to preserve this uncertainty—this sense that it can be seen both ways—rather than erase it with a conclusion.

Back to the 65-Work List

To anyone looking at it, this may seem a work whose title makes immediate sense. But is that really what the artist is aiming at?

Some viewers may arrive at the flame of the title through the image, but I still cannot see it. What rises in my mind is only the artist, smiling yet casting a stern, piercing gaze, and a space filled with heat.

I continue looking a little longer.

The background is a deep black. It seems to represent the unknowable space of the dark cosmos, setting out the premise for the whole work. The concentric circles look as though they show two planets overlapping. Through faint shading, might they indicate a single moment within this space?

The irregular crimson drawing, red strokes that occupy the image with a fierce touch, almost leads me to confuse it with earthly fire sustained by oxygen. Or it brings to mind something still more violent: plasma phenomena such as solar flares, or nuclear fusion reactions.

Could this be an example showing that something human beings can recognize is produced by entirely different principles in a space beyond our reach?

Given the title Flame, this image, innovative even as a design, casts the stern light of a single eye, asking who one is.

The image presents different appearances on its left and right sides. The same design appears on both sides. Yet I still cannot see what it represents.

From its upper and lower parts, finely vibrating rainbow lines extend from left to right, connecting the designs on the two sides. They do not pass across the entire image; they seem to indicate the passage through time of this designed form.

The background changes through gradation from dark gray on the left to bright white. On the right, green is the dominant color, alongside colors that suggest a prism of light. Is the artist trying to apprehend what human beings can recognize in the present instant from a higher dimension, or perhaps another dimension?

At the upper left is a creature that reminds me of Archaeopteryx. It makes me think of biological evolution. This creature, too, contains green that connects with the right side. If time progresses from left to right, could it show how life has changed its form over a long span of time?

But I still do not know what the identical forms on the left and right are. I feel that if I could recognize something figurative in them, I might enter more deeply into the work. Yet if I force myself to decide, “This is what it is,” I may simply impose my own preconceptions.

So I step a little away from the form itself and return to the title, Difference of Eras.

Even when the same thing exists, what human beings can recognize differs from era to era. What could not be seen in antiquity can be seen in the present. What present-day science cannot see may be recognized as a matter of course in the future.

Then I reverse the viewpoint. How would our world appear if the present were viewed from antiquity? If the future looked back at the present, how incomplete would today's science and common sense appear?

Seen this way, Difference of Eras begins to seem not merely a difference in dates, but a difference in human perception itself.

Has all the time that has passed disappeared?

The forms of living things, geological strata, fossils, tools, buildings, words, ideas. And something whose meaning we still cannot understand. The past leaves many kinds of traces in the present. These, too, may be considered messages arriving from the past.

But a message remaining and our being able to receive it are not the same thing. Even when it is before our eyes, its meaning remains unseen if we lack the perceptive ability to read it. Not understanding something and nothing existing there are not the same.

I still do not know what the forms on the left and right are. I want to leave those forms unknown and continue looking.

Yet the eras certainly leave their footprints. If only we have the perceptive ability to receive their messages.

1984, 38 × 56.5 cm. This work is in my collection.

The title is Image of Red. So first I look at the red. Against blue sky and a black ground, a group of red rectangles is arranged with a strong sense of direction. Their forms are rectilinear and artificial, yet they do not feel motionless within the image.

The red pushes the space. Cuts through it. Moves through it. I feel that kind of force.

But I begin to ask myself, “What is this red depicting?” A building? Some object? Yet the title is not Red Something, but Image of Red. Perhaps the very attempt to return it to something concrete is mistaken.

In its relationships with blue, black, and green, red moves closer to emotion or energy itself than to the color of an object. When we see red, something happens in the human body and mind. Warmth, danger, passion, blood, excitement. Yet it cannot be fixed to any one of these.

The green form above, which seems to be flying, also concerns me. Is it opposed to the red? Is it moving away from it? Or is it another movement born from the force of the red?

At first I was searching for “something red.” But as I continued looking, my attention shifted from the red within the work to what was happening inside me as I looked at it. Color acquires form, and that form returns again to sensation.

Is Image of Red the artist's image of red? Or is it the image of red that arises within me as I look at the work? I still cannot decide where that boundary lies.

Above the black, space spreads through color. But above what does this space spread? Is it the earth, the cosmos, or a space I am not yet able to recognize?

Above a space we cannot recognize, I feel that red, blue, and green bring into being a space we can somehow imagine. There is an uneasiness, as though the ground beneath my feet were crumbling.

Yet the colors do not disappear. Red moves forward with force, blue expands the space, and green moves as though in flight. The very existence of these colors seems to offer encouragement to human beings within the unknown: “Even so, keep moving forward.”

1984, 38 × 56.5 cm. This work is in my collection, and part of it also appears on the cover of Kodansha’s Masahiko Doh Print Collection.

My first impression is not one of difficulty. It looks like an approachable textile design that would fit naturally into a home interior. Straight lines, circles, triangles, quadrilaterals, and gradations coexist effortlessly, and beauty is the first thing that meets the eye.

But it does not end there. Looking closely, I see that the artist uses straight lines and perfect circles. Human beings know straight lines. We understand perfect circles. We can recognize triangles and quadrilaterals too. Yet when we look around the natural world, do perfectly straight lines and perfect circles, as defined in mathematics, lie about as objects just as they are?

Here, familiar geometric forms suddenly began to seem strange to me. To understand nature, human beings draw lines, define circles, and organize space with triangles and quadrilaterals. Are these nature itself? Or are they frameworks that human beings have created in order to perceive the world?

The word “Insist” in the title—something is asserting itself strongly. Is geometry asserting its own existence? Or is an order behind geometry pressing toward us through it?

At first, I saw an accessible, decorative work. As I kept looking, however, I began to wonder whether that very accessibility was an entrance. Perhaps the visible straight lines and circles invite us in, then lead us toward an absolute order or underlying law that may exist beyond them, even if human beings cannot perceive it directly.

A difficult idea is not presented with a difficult face. First the work makes us feel that it is beautiful and draws us close. Only then does it leave us with questions: “Why do we know this shape?” “What is the order of the natural world?” This ease of approach also feels characteristic of the artist.

Looking back afterward, it appears to be a single flow. Yet I did not know that flow from the beginning. With each work, I paused to ask, “Why?” Looking again gave rise to the next question. I think it is important, in this record of following the inquiry through, not to erase that sequence.

1982, 72.5 × 49.5 cm.

The first impression is wonderfully refreshing. Within a space of blue gradations are spheres of different sizes, white shapes like water droplets, a deeper aqua at the center, a form suggesting an inverted triangular pyramid, and a curled rainbow line above. It would look perfectly at home in a living room, and it is beautiful even when viewed as a fine textile design.

But as I continue looking, the deeper aqua at the center begins to draw my attention. The surrounding white shapes look like droplets, yet they do not fall downward under gravity as ordinary droplets do. Rather, they seem to receive some force from the center and fly outward.

Why?

My gaze then moves to the curled rainbow line above. As though prompted by that line, I look again at the whole image, and a milk crown comes to mind: that instant when a drop falls into liquid, force spreads outward from the center, and the surrounding liquid rises like a crown.

Seen this way, the white shapes spreading outward from the center seem to make sense. Yet something immediately catches me again. If this is simply a three-dimensional milk crown transferred onto a two-dimensional picture plane, what accounts for the strange sense of up and down, and of depth? The spheres are not all the same size. There is even a shape like an inverted triangular pyramid.

Here, I wanted to change the very position from which I was looking. If we could view a phenomenon occurring in three dimensions from one dimension higher, what would it look like?

Of course, I cannot see things from a higher dimension. This is only speculation. Yet if I suppose that “a three-dimensional phenomenon has been viewed from a still higher dimension and projected into two dimensions,” the unfamiliar direction of gravity, the force spreading outward from the center, and the spheres of different sizes begin to look connected within a single space.

At first, I saw a refreshing design. Next, I found a milk crown. Finally, I arrived at the question of where I was looking at that familiar natural phenomenon from.

What matters is not deciding, “This is a milk crown.” Might even familiar things take on an entirely different appearance when our viewing position changes? I want to preserve my realization of that possibility.

1982, 72.5 × 49.5 cm. This is a wholly abstract work.

The title is “Pierrot.” So I cannot help searching for a clown in the image. Where is the face? The hat? The costume? The body? Yet the more I look, the clearer it becomes that none of the concrete forms by which we recognize a clown in the real world is present.

I think it is important not to blur this point. A figurative clown and abstraction are not mixed together. The artist has completely dismantled the real-world figure of a clown and replaced it with color and form.

Why, then, did he need to go so far?

Did he simply want to abstract a figure and show us the interest of shapes and colors? As I keep looking with that thought in mind, I begin to suspect the opposite. Perhaps the visible figure of the clown itself was in the artist’s way.

If he painted a real clown, I would look at the makeup, the costume, the comical expression. Then I would assume that I understood it through the ready-made image of “a jester who makes people laugh.” Perhaps that is why the artist first broke apart the outward form.

He dismantles the body, replaces it with color, and removes the recognizable figure. Could this be a way of directing our gaze toward the unseen inner life of the clown, rather than the clown we can see?

At this point, I began to see the clown as a craftsman, not merely a jester: a human being who stands before people, makes them laugh, moves his body, and hones his skills by repeating the same performance again and again. The audience may see only a few minutes onstage. Behind those few minutes, however, lies a long span of time.

There must have been days of failure, and times when his body would not move as he wished. There may have been days of disappointment when the audience did not respond. Repeated practice, accumulated successes and failures—the present instant rests upon all that time.

As I begin to think this way, the background ceases to be merely abstract areas of color. A stage. A rehearsal room. Success. Failure. Joy. Disappointment. Our past does not remain as a complete moving image, like a single film. It remains in fragments. As colors. As sensations. Some are vivid, while others grow vague. Perhaps those countless accumulations are what make the clown who exists now.

Then the two spheres caught my attention. Why two? I feel that these two possess a special radiance.

I wondered whether they might be memories of a brilliant past that the clown himself can recognize. “I did well on that stage.” “At that moment, I became one with the audience.” “I have honed my skills this far.” Not medals bestowed by others, but something like medals earned within his own life.

If so, that past does not simply disappear behind him. Past successes support the self of the present and become strength for the future: “I can do it again.” “I can go further.” The past enters the present, shapes it, and becomes a force that carries him toward the future.

Yet here, too, I cannot be certain. I do not know whether the two spheres are really medals. I do not know whether the background is truly the clown’s past. Still less can I know whether the artist intended all of this.

Even so, the wholly abstract image that initially puzzled me because “there is no clown anywhere” gradually came to make me feel the life of one clown, perhaps more strongly than a work depicting a recognizable clown could. There is no figure. Yet there is the time that this person has lived. Now, I am seeing that time as “Pierrot.”

Back to the 65-Work List

1984, 38 × 56.5 cm.

The title is “Moonlight Serenade.”

When I read this title, I first think of moonlight and music.

Moonlight.

A serenade.

Neither has a form that can be held in the hand. We can hear music, but we cannot see it. Moonlight, too, seems certainly visible, yet we cannot take it out as an object in its own right.

How, then, did the artist place things without form onto a single picture plane?

I look at the image.

First, blue spreads before me.

But this blue is not uniform.

Within the bright blue, a deeper blue has been applied that also looks like clouds.

At first, I tried to understand these as the night sky and clouds.

But here I hesitate a little.

Is this deeper blue really cloud?

For elsewhere in the image there is a white, curving form that flows gracefully around the moon.

To me, this is what looks more like cloud.

The white cloud is not still around the moon.

It flows softly.

It bends, stretches, enfolds the moon, and seems ready to change into another shape at the very next moment.

I follow this white curve with my eyes.

As I do, movement arises within a single still image.

The moon is there.

But the cloud is moving.

If the cloud moves, its position in relation to the moon changes. The appearance of the moonlight changes too.

In other words, I feel that this white, curving cloud does not merely indicate the shape of a cloud. It also brings into the image the time during which the cloud moves and changes shape.

Here my gaze returns once more to the deeper blue in the background.

Then what is this?

Is it another cloud in the distance?

With the white cloud in the foreground and the deeper blue as a distant cloud, might the gradations of color be creating depth in space?

Or is it not cloud at all?

In No.6, “Space,” the overlapping of white and black led me to think about spacetime that our eyes cannot see, and about spaces existing in many layers.

Looking at this deeper blue with that memory in mind, I can no longer decide that it is simply the color of the night sky or a distant cloud.

A space still farther within, beyond human perception.

Rather than depicting it as a concrete object, might the artist be giving it existence through a layer of color, this deeper blue?

I do not know.

It may be a distant cloud.

It may be a space outside human perception.

Or it may be something else that I have not yet noticed.

But I do not want to erase this uncertainty.

I keep looking at the image.

There are flowing lines of white and black.

These lines, too, do not create a fixed form.

They flow, curve, and overlap, continuing somewhere beyond.

As I follow them, I think of the lingering resonance of music.

A note sounds.

Then it disappears.

Yet even after the sound itself has vanished, its resonance remains in the ears and in the heart.

The next note arises and overlaps with the resonance of the previous one.

In this way, music creates a flow within time.

If we could see sound, might it look like these flowing lines of white and black?

Of course, I do not know.

Yet the time I spend following the curves and overlaps of the lines with my eyes begins to coincide with the time of listening to music.

The curve of the white cloud brings time into the image, while the flowing black-and-white lines also connect time through the lingering resonance of sound.

Here, the “Serenade” of the title gradually begins to work within the image, becoming more than simply the name of the work.

And yet, within this flowing world, a green, three-dimensional form has been placed.

Why is this form here?

I pause at this point.

Both the white cloud and the black-and-white lines flow with suppleness.

By contrast, the green solid form is hard.

It is geometric.

It also feels like an artificial order made by human beings through straight lines.

Without this green solid form, I might have gone straight into a dreamlike world of moonlight and music.

But the presence of this hard form suddenly brings me back into real space.

Why did the artist place this geometric solid within a world of flowing curves?

Organic curves and artificial straight lines.

The flow of nature and the order made by human beings.

At first glance, they seem to be opposites.

Yet, strangely, they do not quarrel within the image.

Rather, the flowing curves make the hardness of the green solid stand out, while the green solid makes the softness and movement of the curves more strongly felt.

They complement one another.

In No.2, “Street Corner B-G,” I felt that nature, although pressed into the civilization built by human beings, seemed to adapt to that environment and continue to exist.

In No.7, artificial geometric forms and curves suggestive of nature coexist within the same image, without either excluding the other.

Perhaps the order made by human beings does not exist outside the larger order of nature and the cosmos either.

And here I return once again to the blue.

The blue of the background, the deeper blue, the white cloud, the flowing black-and-white lines, the green solid form.

As long as I explain each separately, I think I am still only looking at the image by taking it apart.

The depth of the blue allows the white cloud to float.

The flowing white cloud brings time into being.

That flow makes me conscious of the presence of the unmoving moon.

Following the black-and-white lines, I feel the resonance of music that cannot be seen.

And because the green solid form exists within that flow, the image includes not only fantasy but also the real space inhabited by human beings.

Not one of these exists separately.

Each is placed where it belongs, and as they complement one another, they bring my awareness closer to the title “Moonlight Serenade.”

Moonlight itself cannot be painted.

Nor can music itself.

Time cannot be painted either.

Nor can a space beyond human perception be painted just as it is.

Even so, through color, gradation, curves, straight lines, forms, and their overlapping, might the artist be trying to make us feel the presence of what cannot be seen directly?

At first, the title made me imagine a beautiful moonlit night and music.

But as I followed the white cloud, I felt time; I hesitated over the deeper blue; I thought about the resonance of sound through the black-and-white lines; and the green solid brought me back to artificial order.

And in the end, I came to think about how all of these exist within the same time and space, complementing one another.

“Moonlight Serenade.”

This title does not explain the meaning of the image from the outset.

Perhaps it is an entrance through which I can spend time walking within the image, hesitating, returning, and looking once more.

And the question of what the deeper blue in the background might be still remains.

Is it a distant cloud?

Is it a space that human beings cannot perceive?

I will not decide on an answer yet.

Leaving that uncertainty intact, I want to look at this image once more.

Back to the 65-Work List

1984, 35 × 26 cm. This work is in my collection.

The title is “Space I.”

First, I feel the stillness that pervades the entire image.

Yet it is not simply still.

As I continue looking, I notice that fine waveforms and other, gentler waveforms run through that stillness.

They are spaced almost evenly.

And each extends across the whole image while maintaining a constant angle.

At a glance, one might pass over them as a simple repetition of diagonal lines.

But I cannot see these lines as disorderly.

They follow some kind of law.

That is the feeling I have.

Even in nature, various kinds of order exist within things that appear chaotic to our eyes.

Light.

Waves.

Vibration.

Matter.

The universe.

Each exists independently of the rules that human beings have decided upon.

As I look at the waveforms crossing this image, I begin to sense something like an order of nature or the cosmos that was there before human beings existed, rather than a geometric rule made by people.

Then I look at the lower part of the image.

There is a rainbow line.

For me, having continued to look at the artist’s works, the rainbow line is something I cannot overlook.

Yet in this work the rainbow line does not simply run straight across the image.

It oscillates finely.

Moreover, those oscillations do not seem unrelated to the diagonal lines and waveforms running through the background.

As though receiving the flow of the background, the rainbow line itself trembles finely.

Here I think of light.

Or I even think of something like elementary particles.

We live by treating the world we can see with our eyes as “reality.”

Yet modern science has revealed that many things exist in this world that human eyes cannot see directly.

Invisible.

Therefore nonexistent.

Can we really say that with certainty?

Here I begin to question my own act of “seeing.”

Is it right to regard only what is visible as fact?

Might the world my vision can grasp be no more than a tiny part of this immense universe?

Thinking this way, the fine waveforms running through the image and the oscillations of the rainbow line no longer look like mere design.

Perhaps, through lines, I am being made to feel the presence of something I cannot see.

Then I move my gaze downward.

There is a black triangle.

Within it, a triangle of warm color exists.

Inside it are fine diagonal lines.

But those diagonal lines are not mechanically ordered.

They are freehand.

And they are forceful.

Here the impression of the image changes.

In the waveforms spreading through the background, I had sensed a great order beyond humanity.

Yet the moment I enter this triangle, I sense human will there.

Human beings have tried to understand what they do not understand.

They have tried to see what cannot be seen.

They have brought forth science, built up technology, and created civilization.

I see that human passion in these warm colors and forceful, hand-drawn diagonal lines.

The fact that the colors are warm also seems important to me.

There is more than cold knowledge here.

There is heat.

Human curiosity directed toward what is unknown, and the desire to know at all costs.

In a sense, that passion is so strong that it is almost endearing.

But here I pause again.

With passion as great as this, human beings have built civilization.

Then how much of the entire universe is represented by the facts we have been able to learn through that civilization?

Does the amount of fact we know really keep pace with the magnitude of human passion?

What science has discovered.

What technology has made visible.

These things are certainly wonderful.

But have we not, without noticing, come to think of what civilization has been able to know as “the world itself”?

Here my gaze moves from the lower triangle upward.

Above, too, is a form that looks like a triangle.

Yet this form is not complete within the picture plane alone.

It extends beyond the edge.

And beyond it is darkness.

I cannot see this darkness as merely a black background.

A world that human beings still cannot see.

Time and space that we still cannot perceive.

I feel as though such unknown things stretch out on the other side of this darkness.

The upper form also has silver diagonal lines that seem to echo those below.

Yet these lines are not the same.

When they enter the dark-colored region, they break off.

Compared with the forceful freehand diagonal lines below, they begin to lose their vigor.

I even sense hesitation in them.

Why?

Within the realm that present-day human civilization can perceive, we can draw lines with confidence.

“This is how it is.”

“This law explains it.”

We can say such things.

But the moment we step outside that perception, we can no longer maintain the same certainty.

The lines break off.

They lose their force.

And here a strange thought occurred to me.

Is this really a triangle in the first place?

From the portion visible within the picture plane, I call this form a “triangle.”

It appears to have three sides.

So I perceive it as a triangle.

But part of the form extends beyond the picture plane.

I have not seen what lies beyond.

Although I have not seen it,

“It must continue beyond this point and form a triangle,”

I complete it in my own mind in this way.

What if the shape changed beyond the edge of the picture?

What if it became a distorted quadrilateral in the world of darkness?

Or what if it became an entirely different form, one that cannot be expressed through the geometry we know?

If the conditions of time and space change, perhaps it is, in truth, an entirely different shape.

Then the question returns from the work to myself.

I think that what I see is the thing’s “true form.”

But perhaps, in fact,

it is the form seen from the time in which I live.

The form seen from the space in which I exist.

And the form visible through the visual capacities given to the human species.

Am I not seeing only that one aspect?

If the viewing position changes.

If time changes.

If the dimension changes.

If the very capacity to perceive changes.

The same existence might appear as a completely different form.

Thinking this way, even the word “triangle” becomes uncertain.

Perhaps I am not seeing a triangle but seeing myself, capable of perceiving it only as a triangle.

Having reached this point, I look at the entire image once more.

The waveforms in the background.

The fine oscillations.

The rainbow line.

The black triangle.

The warm-colored triangle.

The forceful freehand diagonal lines.

The form extending upward.

Darkness.

The silver lines breaking off.

These are not forms placed separately.

In the background is a great cosmic order that may exist independently of human beings.

Within it, people try to know what they cannot see and build civilization.

Yet outside the world that civilization has been able to know, an immense unknown still exists.

The moment we try to enter that unknown, the lines, forms, and perceptions we had thought certain begin to waver.

Everything is connected within time and space.

And finally, I look at one more color.

Warm color still remains in the frame of the upper form.

This is what matters to me.

There is darkness.

The lines break off.

Even the shape cannot be established.

Yet the warm color has not disappeared.

That is why I do not receive this darkness as despair.

The unknown is frightening.

Standing before what they do not understand, human beings hesitate.

But

being unknown and being hopeless are not the same thing.

What we cannot see now may be visible to human beings in the future.

What present science cannot explain may, in the future, be understood as an ordinary fact.

And from that future, when people look at us in the present, even what we consider “certain facts” may seem no more than a tiny part.

Here I return once again to the title.

“Space I.”

Does space mean simply space?

The space within the picture plane.

The space outside it.

Space that human beings can perceive.

Space that we cannot yet perceive.

And the time flowing within that space.

At first, I was looking at a still image.

From there, I followed the waveforms, noticed the oscillations of the rainbow line, and thought of invisible light and elementary particles.

From the warm colors and forceful lines below, I felt the passion of human civilization.

When I turned my eyes to the darkness above, that certainty wavered.

And in the end,

“Am I really seeing this world?”

I returned to that question.

I do not know the answer.

Yet it is this very uncertainty that brings me back before “Space I” once more.

What is unseen is not necessarily nonexistent.

Perhaps I simply cannot see it yet.

Back to the 65-Work List

1984, 26 × 35 cm.

The title is “Light and Clouds.”

First, I look at the image with this title in mind.

Light and clouds.

Both are familiar presences to us.

We see light almost every day.

We can also see clouds when we look up at the sky.

Judging by the title alone, then, it may not seem to be a work depicting anything difficult.

Yet as I continue looking, the very act of “seeing” begins to trouble me.

Clouds are visible.

With my own eyes, I can confirm that they certainly exist there.

Yet because the clouds are there, I cannot see things that certainly exist beyond them.

There may be blue sky.

There may be the sun.

And farther beyond, immense cosmic space extends, beyond the reach of human vision.

But if there is a cloud before my eyes, I cannot see these things.

Here I think something strange.

Because something visible exists, another existence becomes invisible.

What is visible is not the whole world.

Rather, perhaps the very fact that something is visible causes me to lose sight of what lies beyond it.

The “clouds” in the title begin to be more than simply clouds in a natural landscape.

Then I think about the clouds themselves.

A cloud does not remain a cloud forever.

There is water.

That water becomes water vapor.

The water vapor rises.

Then it becomes cloud, and eventually becomes rain and returns to the earth.

Water.

Water vapor.

Cloud.

Rain.

Their appearances change.

At times they are visible to human eyes, and at other times invisible.

Yet they are not separate existences.

They are a single natural cycle continuing through changes of appearance within time.

Thinking this way, perhaps the very act of isolating and looking at one form called “cloud” serves human convenience.

I give a name to “the appearance visible as cloud at this moment.”

But from nature’s perspective, it is only an instant within a long cycle.

Here my eyes return to the colors of the whole image.

The lower part is a bright, pale purple.

As my gaze moves upward from there, the purple gradually deepens.

It is a beautiful gradation.

Yet I cannot simply pass over it as the coloring of the background.

Why is it bright below, growing darker as it rises?

I sense time in it.

I try thinking of the bright, pale purple below as the “present” in which I now exist.

As I proceed upward, the color deepens, gradually entering a realm I cannot see through.

It also feels like a future that cannot yet be seen.

We can perceive the present because we are here now.

But we do not know the future.

We cannot see it until time advances.

If so, might this gradation from pale purple to deep purple indicate time advancing from a bright present toward a future we cannot yet see into?

Of course, a darker color does not necessarily mean the future.

Viewed from the opposite direction, time might be read differently.

Even so, to me now, this change of color feels like a space possessing time, rather than a still background.

Rainbow-colored light runs through that space.

Yet here, too, I pause.

Ordinarily, when I hear “ray of light,” I imagine a straight line.

But the light in this work is different.

It undulates gently.

It advances through the image, oscillating softly.

As I follow that line with my eyes, strangely, I feel less as though I am looking at impersonal light than as though something is breathing.

Although it is light, it also feels like the breath of life.

Why did the artist not depict light as a straight line?

Was he trying to show the physical properties of light?

Or was it to give time and movement to the entire image?

Or am I simply feeling life in the undulating line of my own accord?

I do not know.

Yet when I follow the line while leaving that uncertainty intact, something else draws my attention.

There is not just one ray of light.

Many rays of rainbow-colored light advance through the image, each undulating gently.

Why is there not just one?

And why does each oscillate instead of proceeding straight ahead?

Nor do all the lines continue in the same way.

Some cross from side to side.

Others break off partway.

Why?

Why do they break here?

Is this merely a compositional device?

I cannot ignore these “breaks.”

As I continue looking, I begin to feel something of an instant in them.

We live through time as something continuous.

From yesterday to today.

From today to tomorrow.

After one second comes another.

We think that time flows without interruption.

Yet when I look at these breaks in the lines, I feel as though there are places where a single instant has been cut out of the time we believe to be continuous.

Is time really continuous in the way we feel it to be?

Here I return to the clouds in the image.

Rather than trailing horizontally, the cloudlike forms seem to rise from below toward the top.

This, too, is strange.

I usually see clouds floating in the sky as a horizontal expanse.

They drift with the wind and move sideways.

Then why do they move from below upward in this work?

I return to the water cycle I considered earlier.

Before a cloud becomes a cloud.

Water evaporates from the sea, rivers, the ground, and other places.

It becomes water vapor and rises while still invisible to human eyes as cloud.

If so, might the artist have tried to place in one image not only the completed appearance of clouds but also the time during which water changes into cloud?

Thinking this way, meaning emerges in the forms rising from below.

But just as I begin to feel satisfied by this, I stop once more.

Is that really all there is?

Water vapor rises and becomes cloud.

Certainly, that would explain it.

Yet as I continue looking, these cloudlike forms gradually begin to look like something else.

Not clouds, but rifts in space.

Or holes opened in space.

They begin to look like such things as well.

Of course, human beings cannot directly see something like a “rift in spacetime.”

I myself do not know what such a thing would look like.

So this is my imagination.

Nor can I assert that the artist depicted anything of that kind.

Yet as I look at this form, I cannot help thinking.

If something like a rift in spacetime, beyond human knowledge, were to exist, how could it be expressed in a painting?

To depict what cannot be depicted directly, might he have borrowed things from nature that continue to exist while changing form: water, water vapor, clouds, and rain?

Precisely because water moves back and forth across the boundary between the visible and the invisible, might it be able to indicate spacetime that cannot be seen directly?

The moment I think this, the meaning of the “clouds” I first saw changes again.

At first, I thought that because the clouds were there, I could not see beyond them.

Next, I thought of the clouds themselves as a stage within the water cycle.

And now, through those cloudlike forms, I am thinking about space itself that human beings cannot see.

Although I am looking at a single motif, its meaning changes as I spend more time looking.

And here my gaze returns once more to the many undulating rays of light.

What if time were not limited to the one-directional time human beings perceive in everyday life?

We feel as though we live within a single flow of time, from past to present, and from present to future.

Yet might that be only the appearance of time that human beings can perceive?

There is not just one ray of light running through the image.

There are many.

Moreover, each undulates rather than proceeding straight.

As I look simultaneously at those multiple rays and the cloudlike forms that resemble rifts opened in space, I find myself wondering whether time, too, might not be singular.

Time different from the time human beings perceive.

Time existing in multiple dimensions, beyond our direct perception.

Might these multiple undulating rays suggest the possibility that such time exists?

Of course, I cannot see multidimensional time.

Nor do I know what it might be like.

So I cannot assert that “the artist depicted multidimensional time.”

Yet in this image, I can no longer think of the light that does not travel straight, the many rays of light, the light that breaks off partway, and the cloudlike forms resembling rifts in spacetime as separate existences.

They complement one another.

Because I saw the multiplicity of light, I think about the multiplicity of time.

Because I saw the breaks in the light, I question the time I had believed to be continuous.

Because I sensed a rift in spacetime, I wonder whether time and space different from those we perceive might exist beyond it.

The fact that there are many, rather than one.

The fact that they undulate, rather than being straight.

The fact that they break off, rather than continuing.

And the fact that a form suggesting a rift in spacetime exists nearby.

Not one is without purpose; only as they complement one another do I come to consider even the possibility of “time existing in multiple dimensions.”

Here I look at the whole image once more.

Color changing from pale purple to deep purple.

Many gently undulating rays of rainbow-colored light.

Lines breaking off partway.

Cloudlike forms rising from below.

They begin to seem more than separately arranged elements of design.

The change in color made me think of time from present to future.

The undulating light made me feel movement and the breath of life.

The multiple rays made me consider a possibility beyond the single time that human beings perceive.

The breaks in the lines made me think about an “instant.”

The rising clouds made me think of the water cycle.

And as I continued looking at those clouds, I even imagined rifts in spacetime.

One thing makes me notice the next.

And noticing the next changes the meaning of what I saw first.

Perhaps this is what it means for things to complement one another, as I have repeatedly felt in the artist’s works.

Meaning is not completed by color alone.

Nor by light alone.

Nor by clouds alone.

Nor by lines alone.

As each complements the others, they bring the passage of time and the expanse of space into a single still image.

Here I also find myself returning to what I have considered in No.6, “Space,” No.7, “Moonlight Serenade,” and No.8, “Space I.”

The world that human beings can see.

The world we cannot see.

The present.

The future.

Space we can perceive.

Space we cannot perceive.

Rather than being divided, might these be connected along the continuation of the same time?

And finally, my eyes return once more to the broken light.

The light is gentle and beautiful.

Yet there is a certain tension in the cloudlike forms.

This is not a work in which beauty allows me to feel at ease.

Rather, I pause because a small sense of something amiss has been placed within that beauty.

Why does the light break off?

Why is there not just one ray of light?

Why does the light undulate instead of traveling straight?

Why do the clouds rise upward?

Why do the colors move toward a dark realm?

And are the time and space that we believe to be continuous really continuous?

I have no answer.

The idea of rifts in spacetime and the idea of time existing in multiple dimensions are no more than my imagination.

Yet precisely because no answer emerges, I return to the image.

“Light and Clouds.”

After sustained looking, the two words that seemed familiar at first have become words that question anew the very time and space in which I live.

I am still in the midst of that question.