Yuzen Universe

My way of working is what I call Between Seeing and Imagining.

Seeing is what the eye takes in. A mottled wall, the branches of an old tree, a photograph of a landscape—things anyone passes in a day—set off an association in me, and I find in them the faces of all kinds of sprite-like beings. Sometimes they gather in groups and talk; sometimes they pile up together, playing. They wear smiles, full of joy. When I watch them dancing, I seem to see my inner self step in and dance with them.

Imagining is what the mind’s eye sees, where imagination has no limit. Dreams and inventions run before me like images in a projector, frame after frame, and they are the wellspring of my work. Even a figure made purely of imagination, never seen in the world, can first be drawn in line and then shaped in clay—a crowd of time travellers in every imaginable form, each another endless version of the self.

Between seeing and imagining is what ferments once the two fuse. An image or a situation moves me; I extend it with imagination, then rearrange, recombine, and remake it—this is my visual association. And because thought keeps changing like water, never settling, the same beginning branches out, and the works that come of it are varied and never twice the same.

When I work, I empty my thinking, rely on intuition, and catch the inspiration of an instant. In my earlier work I often took the face-like patterns I found around me, drew them as illustrations, then shaped them in clay—turning illustration into three dimensions. Clay is my main language, because its plasticity can give a living form its appearance quickly. After painting and a high-temperature firing, the kiln often holds a surprise.

As the work went on, I gradually stopped deciding the form in advance: the hands go first, the form arrives after. I deliberately give a piece no single front, so that a viewer has to walk around it and meet a different life at every angle.

I believe the world has always been alive. By “alive” I mean that the world holds, always, possibilities for life that have not yet been seen. Those textures, traces, and forms come into life gradually through seeing, imagination, and the work of the hands. I do not record it, and I do not create it; I too am a participant in that becoming.