Alchemy without Intention

A while ago, the gallery I was working with invited me to participate in a group exhibition centered around the theme of alchemy. My first thought was to make a new work specifically for the exhibition. At the time, however, I was working on another painting that I thought had absolutely nothing to do with the subject. I even had a completely different work in mind for the exhibition.

When the gallery proposed the exhibition to me, I was excited. It felt, for a brief and difficult-to-explain moment, like a “calling.” The idea of alchemical gold, and the way alchemy approaches transformation not only as a material process but also as a philosophical one, had fascinated me for many years. I had never thought of alchemy simply as the story of turning lead into gold. What interested me was the metaphorical language through which human beings try to understand their own transformation.

Looking back today, what I find interesting is this: the painting I made about alchemy was not the painting I had planned to make for the exhibition.

It was the other painting, quietly continuing to grow in the background.

The painting began as a self-portrait.

For a long time, people have been able to read my works as self-portraits. I understand why. The same smiling face has been appearing in different bodies for years. Sometimes this is true, sometimes it isn't. I am not painting myself—or at least, I am not painting only myself. I believe that something personal can open into a shared space. That is why the faces of my figures resemble one another. Sometimes the moon becomes the sun, sometimes the sun becomes the moon. When asked which one it is, I never give a clear answer. I paint them in exactly the same way.

Something different happened in this painting for the first time.

For the first time, I drew my smiling face not as a real face, but as a mask I was wearing.

At the center of a cobalt-blue square canvas, a naked figure sits, illuminated in white, with emerald green seeming to glow in the darkness. The figure wears nothing except a mask. In one hand, it holds a mirror by its handle. From inside the mirror, the face of the mask extends toward the figure.

The figure is surrounded by fireflies.

In the distance, trees emerge through the mist.

The same fireflies appear again, this time scattered among the trees, illuminating the darkness beneath the moonlight like tiny points of light.

Chains surround the four edges of the canvas. They begin at the corners and extend along the edges, breaking at the exact center of each side. Along the upper edge, two identical figures sit facing one another. They reach their hands toward each other. Their fingers almost touch, but do not quite meet. Above them is a full moon.

The painting stopped there.

And I did not know how to continue it.

Around that same time, I bought a ticket to Japan, spending almost all of the money I had been saving for years for what I considered an emergency and what was, to me, a significant amount of money.

Today, I understand that decision better.

My dream had not simply been to travel alone.

My dream had been to build a life that would one day allow me to take myself to Japan.

It was a dream I had carried, from time to time, throughout my childhood and youth, without ever fully believing that it would actually come true.

Being able to give myself this gift at the age of thirty-six was an overwhelming feeling for me.

Today, I realize that the money that took me to Japan had also come from a painting.

From a commission in which I painted the twin children of a friend.

In the painting, the two siblings stood back to back. They held mirrors in their hands. Beneath the moonlight, they were looking at their own faces.

I began my own self-portrait after completing that work.

I did not make this connection at the time.

In fact, I did not make any of the connections I describe here while they were happening.

I had decided not to plan anything during the trip.

That was important to me.

But just a few days before I left, I came across a small event about which there was very little information.

A firefly night held on a full-moon evening in a Zen garden in Tokyo.

The event was the day after I arrived.

I thought about the painting I had been working on for months.

And I bought a ticket.

I still cannot fully describe what I experienced that night.

I almost found myself inside the painting I had made.

Moonlight.

Mist.

Hundreds of fireflies.

Cobalt-blue signs.

Green characters that seemed to glow.

It was an intensely disorienting moment.

I experienced other moments like this throughout the journey.

In Kyoto, I visited Ōkōchi Sansō.

What distinguished the garden from other Zen gardens was that it had been built over the course of an artist's lifetime, rather than by a temple or an aristocrat.

I think this idea affected me as much as the garden itself.

In a small retreat at the highest point, I encountered this poem by Ryōkan:

The flower, without intention, invites the butterfly;And without any will to do so, the butterfly visits flowers.Once the flower opens, the butterfly comes;And when the butterflies come, the flower will open wide.I, too, without knowing a particular person,Or that person, without knowing me,Simply follow the way Heaven has decreed.

I could not fully understand that day why the poem beginning with these lines affected me so deeply.

There were blank sheets of paper and pens on the table.

I copied the poem in Japanese.

Then, on another sheet of paper, I drew a flower and a key.

As I was leaving the garden, I left a small note in the visitors' book:

May the garden in your heart blossom, sooner or later.— a late bloomer

Instead of my name, as I always do, I simply drew my smiling face.

After my grandfather died, I found a small collection of old keys in his workshop.

Later, I learned from my mother that he had been a carpenter in his youth, making doors and keys.

I, too, have been using the image of the key in my paintings for years.

Since then, from time to time, I have entrusted some of these keys to different people or left them in different places.

I like the idea of them moving from hand to hand rather than remaining fixed.

Of them acquiring new meanings.

During this journey, I left two of them in Japan.

The second one inside one of the stone lanterns at Ōkōchi Sansō.

When I returned home, both the stone lantern and the keys entered the painting.

I drew my own tattoos onto the arms of the central figure.

I think, for the first time, I wanted it to be understood that the figure I had drawn was actually me.

The painting began to move again.

Years ago, the title of my first small solo exhibition was Flowers in December.

Through flowers and bees, I was thinking about a flower that blooms late; about a person arriving late to their own time.

Looking back today, I see that this was not a new idea.

Later, I returned to the phrase Solve et Coagula.

To dissolve and to come together again.

In alchemy, this idea suggests that in order for something to transform, it must first dissolve.

These words did not explain the painting to me.

Quite the opposite.