“(…) While I’m trying to make the most of it despite of the rough patch, time quickly disappears behind the scenes. Even though I took my quickest steps to recover from the stagnant moments of worrying and procrastinating, when I looked back, the time seemed to have already gone by so far away. No matter how many times I checked and corrected it, my clock was ticking slowly compared to many other people who were vaguely referred to as normal. Meanwhile, I sometimes woke up in the morning and forgot how to walk. Likewise, I frequently became sensitive to the beginning of everything and stopped to restart all over again.
On a snowy day, everyone walks at the same pace as me. My current state and the landscape of the world I think of can be expressed in this sentence: On a beautiful snowy day, there is a white light piled up on the cathedral spire, and people who always seem to run at Mach speeds are walking slowly, all at the same speed, as if they are leisurely hanging around for nothing. I feel like I am living a life at an unrealistic pace that exists in reality in that way. And I decided to accept that slowness to some extent and make up for it. If you take one step at a time, you can soon walk. If you keep walking, one day you will reach somewhere you want to go. (…)”

• This piece is extracted and slightly revised for translation from an article I wrote in the winter of 2012, for Contemporary Art Studio class, summering up works such as ‘Tears and Saints, ‘A pretty flower withers and the ugly process will be laughed at’¹, and so on.

1. This tile was quoted from a lyrics of a song by Sheena Ringo’s ‘Izonshou(依存症, I am an addict)’, the quoted part in English: “(…)Is being played with could be also a beautiful thing as a state? / No, a pretty flower withers, and the ugly process will be laughed. / Always.”, in original text: “翻弄されているということは 状態として美しいでしょうか/いいえ 綺麗な花は枯れ 醜い過程が嘲笑(わら)うのです/…何時の日も” ↩︎