∞

This piece takes as its theme the well-known story of the faithful dog, Hachiko.
The time Hachiko spent as the loving companion of his owner, Hidesaburo Ueno, is said to have been barely 16 months, but the months and years followed Ueno's sudden death, when he would nevertheless come to Shibuya Station to wait for him, extended many times that to almost a full decade. My chest always tightens imagining what he must have felt.
Tired after his years of waiting, Hachiko, whose name is also the Japanese word for "8," lay down one day, forming an "∞" shape, before crossing the Rainbow Bridge to the other side. He was then finally reunited with the person he loved most. I can only imagine how happy he must have been. This picture depicts just that moment. It is drawn in the hope that the two can be together forever in the next world.

Vestiges of the City

hibuya seems to me like a city that is always under construction and where the culture of the city is always gradually changing.
Finding vestiges that remain within this everchanging city is the archaeological fieldwork for Shibuya's street culture crowd, fieldwork that I think once again gives rise to new culture. This piece is created to visualize this feeling of being repainted from above while the things that remain entangle themselves while being connected to somewhere else.

Windowscape

This painting colorfully depicts feelings and memories that come tumbling out of daily life, taking ordinary, immediately visible scenes such as buildings and plants as its motifs. I have enjoyed the culture of Shibuya since I was a high school student, be it the shopping, fashion or art. I also visit it as a place to communicate with friends. The many colorful windows of this piece invite the viewer to imagine the people gathering there, portraying a dream-like world at the intersection of the ordinary and extraordinary.

"The Wall" SBY MIX 2023

As you walk around Shibuya you encounter works of graffiti and wall art. New pieces are painted again over the top of older ones. This piece samples those works of graffiti and recreates them on the canvas, before removing the color from the image to extract just the silhouettes of those motifs, expressing them in a more abstract form.

May

When I was a student, I would come to record shops to encounter new music, big bookstores to look at the art and photo albums amidst all the other stimulations offered by the city of Shibuya. Holding my first private exhibition here, I also encountered like-minded people.
I hope that Shibuya is able to continue to be a place where cultures and people can mingle.
Through this piece I have attempted to visualize a city constantly emitting bracing light that inspires bright futures.

Diagram of a Quantum Garden - Shibuya, Tokyo

This work takes as its themes "space" and "gardens." It is an image of a Shibuya garden that draws inspiration from quantum physics. The painting suggests that in the "bit valley" of Shibuya, where all manner of information and all kinds of people's workings intersect day and night, a multiplicity of realities exist. The artist hopes that as the new stories of people from across the world who visit Shibuya recur, the future continues to be born.

City of Evolution

While the graffiti, stickers and taggings you see all around the streets of Shibuya continue to be chaotically overwritten atop one another, viewed observationally over a long span of time, they can be read as stored up "street history." My own work, with its overlapping random images, bears a resemblance to it. This piece expresses a Shibuya that is a city at the apex of "time and the accumulation of history" as a "crystallization of human progress and wisdom." In making this piece, I walked around the center of Shibuya at night, gathering the "lights" emitted from advertisements, neon signs and construction sites, sampling them in my own work. In the culture that colors this place, I feel an energy that progresses beyond the city, beyond nations and beyond time.