[Gallery Visit No. 145] Close your eyes, and in your slumber, touch me — On the works exhibited by Kana Shimizu in 'Carving the Now' —
Close your eyes, and in your slumber, touch me
— 'Carving the Now' Mina Fukuda & Kana Shimizu Exhibition (Gallery FACE to FACE)
— On the works exhibited by Kana Shimizu —
Toshihiko Aman
To see is to be seen. And not to see is also not to be seen. Seeing becomes thinking, and being seen becomes being thought about. When you close your eyelids, your thoughts slowly sink into a lake of tranquility. At that moment, the image of 'me' emerges.
Kana Shimizu is a painter who uses portraits of people as a motif to express the texture beyond them. In her oil paintings, she depicts expressions mixed with emotional intensity, while in her copperplate prints, she depicts a return to the origin of the soul. There, she seems to be expressing the afterimage of 'life' that emerges after both body and spirit have crumbled, but at the same time, she is summoning what wraps around the 'me' to which 'life' is inherently connected.
The world is made up of countless existences. People, animals, insects, fish, plants, microorganisms. Stones, soil, water, and even light, heat, and vibration. If we think of them as a chain of connections, everything is an equal existence. The French philosopher Bergson describes them as images, but among all images, for 'me', the 'body' of 'me' that connects them is a special image. That image creates the phantom of 'me'.
Like all existences, each of us has a window of flesh. Just as the setting sun shines through a window, the shadows woven by the light from outside bring about my self-awareness. However, that is merely something expressed by external forces, and a vast, unspoken remainder remains.
When you close your eyelids as if closing a window, the chain that was obstructed by vision emerges. The senses of the body, which is the vessel of the soul, connect to something greater through insects, fish, and plants. Just as makeup runs with the oils of the face, when the self that was painted over by being seen crumbles, what emerges is likely the great nature, the great universe itself, which is the home of my soul.
