I film things that do not need to be filmed.
A man with a Van Gogh sun painted inside his coat.
Young men steering a remote-controlled car carrying a stuffed dog through an empty parking lot.
A skateboarder practicing without wheels.
Not as metaphor.
Not as resistance.
Not for an audience.
Simply because this is what they do.
Sometimes I construct a situation, perform an action myself, or introduce something that does not quite belong. At other times, I simply film what happens in front of me.
I do not see these as opposing approaches. By making something slightly unreal, I sometimes become able to see something that was already real. At other times, reality itself is strange enough. I only need to remain there long enough to notice it.
I began making video in 2003. While searching for a way to become an artist in Berlin, I encountered the work of Bruce Nauman. His approach to art as an action in progress, rather than as a completed object, changed how I understood making.
Since then, I have continued to work through actions, attention, and repetition.
I have filmed at home and in my neighborhood in Japan, as well as during temporary stays in places including Vietnam and Africa. I do not go looking for an extraordinary world. I work with what comes within reach.
More than 300 video works have accumulated through this practice.
The works have changed as my surroundings and circumstances have changed. Yet something has remained.
I keep returning to a simple question:
What kind of world are we living in? And am I part of it?
I make work because I want to accept, in some way, the world I am living in—its beauty, its absurdity, its contradictions, and its injustices.
The impulses behind my works often begin with something small: a discomfort, a fear, an irritation, a question, or something I cannot quite explain.
I have come to think of myself less as an autonomous subject than as something that reacts to its surroundings. A place, a person, a sound, an event, or a passing moment can provoke a response before I understand why.
Perhaps making is not always an act of intention. Perhaps it is also a response.
Making a work allows me to take something I cannot fully understand, transform it, and encounter it again.
This process does not resolve reality. It allows me to stay with it.
The world changes constantly while remaining fundamentally unmoved. Mutation and permanence appear to me as the same movement seen from different distances.
A place is never quite the same place twice. What I see changes because the place changes, because I change, and because something I could not have anticipated has entered the frame.
I sometimes wonder whether place does not simply contain time, but somehow produces our experience of it.
Video matters to me because it resists closure.
Video is light, and the presence or absence of light is inseparable from the presence or absence of what can be seen. Unlike a physical object, a video image exists as a phenomenon.
Filming is also a way of allowing my own life to remain somewhere.
The time spent filming is one of the moments when I feel most strongly that my life is being fixed somewhere—not as a complete record, but as a trace of having been there, looking, responding, and making.
When filming, the world continuously introduces things I neither predicted nor wanted: wind, hesitation, exhaustion, interruption, failed timing, silence, empty duration.
Reality does not collaborate. It intrudes.
I do not use the camera to document reality. I use it because reality remains unresolved.
I do not fully understand the people I film.
I do not fully understand the world that produces them.
I do not fully understand myself as the one who looks and makes.
I believe that not being able to understand the world is not a reason to stop trying to know it.
For me, making art is to continue moving within that uncertainty—to look, to respond, to make, and to discover something I could not have known before making it.
The world does not hold still long enough to be understood.
What disappears cannot be fully recovered.
I continue filming anyway.