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Snow-road

Oumi-City, Niigata, Japan

37°2'2.41"N, 137°49'24.50"E

Nov.16 - Dec.7
2001

This is the work I made during my homecoming for the first time in ten years. The scenery of my former home, schools and other familiar places I used to play in had seldom changed. However, I didn’t really feel I had come back to my home town and instead wandered around the village. Drizzling snow had covered the village before I knew it. When the village came up in white color, I remembered something and then turned around. My footmarks meandered with my wandering interests or thoughts. I felt as if holes on the snow were the chance for me to glance my hometown and myself at the same time. I was beginning to shovel the snow through the long way of my footmarks. It traced the way I used to stop at and the way I used to leave home for unknown places. While shoveling, I saw footmarks of other people and animals that diverge from there and I also removed the snow on them. That experience made me sense several “existences” that take part in the village. From then on, I came to made more works in my hometown because of the experience which produced this work. By deepening my physicality for the hometown autobiographically, this work became a “road of pilgrimage” which makes the followers think of the subterranean heat, several “participants” in the village and animal’s life, in the fissures of the land of lay.