【Statement】

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I first witnessed an extraction site so vast that it seemed to erase mountains.

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When I visited Hualien City, I went to a limestone quarry, the raw material for cement. The sight of massive excavated land, where large dump trucks moved continuously back and forth, was overwhelming. Looking up, mountains several hundred meters high rose around me, their peaks hidden in the clouds, impossible to see clearly. The slopes of the mountains were terraced like steps, extending all the way down to where heavy machinery operated, including the ground where I was standing. In other words, it became clear that excavation had progressed from a height so vast it disappeared into the clouds down to my present location. Imagining the landscape before it was excavated, there must have once been a large mountain here. Its scale exceeds human perception by far. Alongside its overwhelming force, the site also made me realize a sense of irreversible transformation.

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The limestone extracted from this quarry eventually becomes cement, and then concrete, forming the structural backbone of cities. Even in the urban landscape of Tainan, where I stayed during my residency, it was used for infrastructure, architecture, and coastal reinforcement. The scenery felt like a movement that carves into mountains while simultaneously advancing toward the sea, solidifying land as it goes. These seemingly separate events did not appear as fragmented phenomena, but rather as a continuous urban process unfolding before me.

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At the starting point of my practice lies my experience of the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 11 in my hometown, Ishinomaki. The earthquake and tsunami destroyed buildings, roads, and the city itself in an instant, overturning the foundation of my world. The reconstruction that followed also proceeded without bridging the distance between reality and emotion. Concrete, once present before me as rubble, reappeared in the form of seawalls. The landscape is inevitably and irreversibly updated.

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Both human-led land formation and natural transformations such as earthquakes and erosion are, in essence, phenomena I perceive as not yet fully differentiated. Although their scale and impact differ, we tend to distinguish them only through questions of responsibility. The disaster I experienced and the reconstruction that followed can be understood as nature on one side and human intervention on the other, yet both were continuous events that radically transformed land and landscape. My concern is not to separate them, but to understand them as part of a single unfolding transformation of the landscape.

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From this perspective, what occurs on the earth’s surface does not exist while maintaining a clear division between nature and the artificial. Rather, it is a series of undifferentiated yet dynamic transformations. These processes unfold on a scale beyond our comprehension and continue to move together with the world itself. However, it is nearly impossible to grasp them as a unified whole. Even so, I continue to touch the fragments that appear before me, using them as entry points for imagination. Confronted with fragments of events too vast to fully comprehend, I am now engaging with them through my practice.