Wish you were here

I spent my childhood at a small village called “Oda” with a population of aboutß 3,500 people, located at mountain area in Shikoku district, southern west part of Japan. As the result of depopulation, the town “Oda” was merged into expanded town “Uchiko” and no longer exist as independent municipality, and the name of town vanished from official maps in 2005. Since I move to New York in 2007, I have chances to recall my past memories more frequently and become obsessed with my childhood. At everyday affair in New York City, where is located such far away distances from the village sheltered by mountains, I find subtle indications of forgotten memories of my childhood at the town. As I try to trace the reminiscence, I come across fragment of surreal and obscured memories, and the make me inevitably confront to rudimental emotion, such as pleasure, fear and desire, as well as abstract and unexplainable feeling which children posses distinctively. In this project, I try to reconstruct memories of my own childhood as one of personal folklore tales of vanishing town. Besides I photograph for collage components, I assemble images, which can evoke memories, to recapture emotional elements of my childhood by using photographs from family album, private snapshots and appropriate everyday objects from the Internet. I construct dioramas, which consist of layers of photo collage on to transparent canvases and sculpture with photographs. In my practice, deconstruct and re-compose photographs by manually cutting and building are important roles in revisiting childhood and inviting the found images personal narratives. The three-dimensional sets are temporary made for photograph to be on the picture plane, and I intentionally make them finite fragile objects by including materials, which are deformed easily, such as sheer papers and aluminum foils, to try to capture the stories which is happening within the space of the dioramas as reconstructed memories of the vanished town, before they destroyed.