Like Paintings: Masayuki Arai

How does one’s own subjectivity capture and represent the real world? Even as we eachform our subjective worlds, we also hold a common subjective view that functions within asocial group. Just as it is said that the subject exists in the reflection of the other’s existence,subjectivity is also influenced by the external in a nested structure where the internal and external are indistinguishable. It could be said that the multiple layers of reciprocity are the causes of the shifts in axis that constantly shake our imaginings and perceptions of the place we call reality, in which we place our bodies.

I collect photographs which (I assume) are taken by others from the internet, paste the print out onto my canvas, and I expand it outside of the frame from imagination. This would be my work process. The painting method I use departs from the visual language of the brush, instead using a syringe to drip the paint onto the canvas, where the aim is to bring together the physical aspect, namely that paint is nothing other than paint, and the conceptual harbouring of image as illusion. Within thecanvas is the “trace” of the photograph from where the painting started. After the imagined surroundings of the image have been added and painted, it is peeled offand thrown away; as if I am switching out another’s viewpoint for my own. Viewerswill never be able to know the origins of my viewpoint, but respectively, I will never be able to fully grasp the entirety of the photograph I used as a motif, thereby movingback and forth between one’s own viewpoint and that of others.

In the serial act of superimposing an image (imagination) over an image (photograph) to create an image (painting), the multiple layers of images will at one point establish a painting. Through the existence of the viewer, however, it is released back into space and ties in as a new image (representation). It is within this unstable chain of transfers that I feel something close to hope.

- Masayuki Ara