My work examines the ambivalent feelings such as desire, conflict, or anxiety derived from everyday lives and the series of events that lead to the emotions as a measure of my existence and identity beyond time and language. By engaging in different levels of self-exploration, I create works that suggest the possibility of expanding personal matters into larger categories so as not to end up with a superficial perception of myself. Throughout a variety of experiments of using discarded clothes, magazines, or fashion brand logos, I have investigated how contemporary culture produces societal values and assumptions about different kinds of bodies and demeanors.

Identifying the meaning of my existence through introspection is the key to my practice. I am inspired by contemporary art’s exploration of the personal, the power of Japanese literature to make small things not trivial, and the daily news I read every day. As my work engages with ideas around race, gender identity, cultural background, age, political views and class, I continue to experiment with scale and materials that speak to these concerns.

In the Receipt Project, I focus on my consumer behavior and its symbolic aspects to describe the confrontation of a mid-thirty-crisis in New York. It consists of three major works: two videos, an interactive installation, and a book of receipts and notes, which is the centerpiece of the project. This winter, my daily transactions magnified my personal history. The traces of life are fiercely and routinely revealed through multidisciplinary approaches that stem from the daily records. The uses of layers and transparency are also dominant in this project as metaphors for the interaction and accumulation of everyday life.