toshiaki tomita

……My first one-man show originated in a dream I often had of a waterside scene. By doing something during the day that was linked to my dreams at night, I wondered if this might influence my dreams and weather it might reveal things that dreams and reality have in common. Travel and dreams seem to stimulate each other. ……From the beginning I focused on the invisible things that are revealed while producing a work, rather than on the work as an object. For example, it is more interesting to see how that picture takes on a completely different meaning. When the way you look at things changes, your awareness changes. Even after a works has been completed, it can still teach various things beyond the intentions of the artist. A Journey to the Original Spring was a work in which viewers underwent the experience of entering a darkened space holding a small torch. When my mother saw it, she said it was just like the Gojusoden ceremony they performed at the Jodo Buddhist temple where she grew up. My works seem to have a kind of atavistic effect, making links with somewhere deep in psyche. ……In my first one-man show, I also used a waterside motif, but on that occasion I shut myself off because I wanted to determine where “myself” ended and “others” began. After that I moved in the direction of opening myself up.
(from interview with Toshiaki Tomita, Password: a Danish/Japanese Dialogue cat.)

On what motives and ground, is he involved in his creation? It is not too much to say that if he will be able to keep his creation without being the puppet if the trend of arts which changes as fashion or not is depend on how he is conscious of this question. Tomita confronted this exhibition making himself as the ground with considering this point.
Opening the door and entered the dark place holding a light one by one, we found that there were small monochrome photos and the vessel filled with water which appeared on the photos symbolically.
This exhibition is put some scribbled rough sketches and noted everywhere, and it continued to the third floor with the base of serious of stories. The content of this story is the nostalgic documentary that its artist goes round to find the source where he had visited when he was a child again, taking the opportunity that he saw the shore in his dream.
This work of art is made up of actions for himself, so narcissism is remarkable for sure and it may be criticized that it’s just a complacent diary of self-confession. But on the other hand, the motive of the creation is neither vagueness nor an exaggeration, but it is filled with his feeling of reality and the firm world exists in his works. When others will be able to feel sympathy for this artist’s own world, the self-centered action will be the open-minded creation and it will sublimate into the artistic one by itself.
There is no arts for arts and nor for society first, the arts arise little by little from private activity. This exhibition makes us think about it.

HIRANO Itaru (Curator of Saitama Modern Art Museum)