"Mother-of-pearl inlay: The surface as its essence"

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(Excerpt) A black cube, its surface shimmering with a light like the wings of a jewel beetle, its tiny Arabic numerals and intersecting lines reminiscent of integrated circuits changing from green to reddish-purple to bluish-purple—(Excerpt)

"Mother-of-pearl inlay," a genre of lacquerware with a long history dating back to the Shōsōin Treasure House, is inevitably expensive due to its rare materials and complex process. While it's still used today for tea ceremony utensils, high-end tableware, and furniture, it's not as readily accessible to the general public as so-called "everyday crafts" that focus on frequently used everyday objects. This craft, once considered exclusive, old-fashioned, and far removed from daily life, now takes on a science fiction-like image that resonates with us today. (excerpt)

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Light flickers above the pure darkness. Fragments of stories rise up like holograms. The ingenuity of the mother-of-pearl inlay technique ties images that might otherwise drift into the void to physical objects, establishing them as beings that "are not there, yet exist." Precisely because it is a thin film on the surface, less than a millimeter thick, the technique, time, and images accumulated there with an almost unimaginable obsession stir irresistible emotions in the viewer's heart. (omitted) Certainly, the technique is classical. But it could also be said that only the images shared by viewers differ from era to era. For example, regarding the "Hatsune no Chido" (Hatsune furnishings), which depicts the waka poem composed by Akashi no Ue in the 23rd chapter of "The Tale of Genji," "Let the person who has grown old drawn to the pine tree hear today's first song of the nightingale," and also features lacquerware depicting pine trees and nightingales, it is no different from the fact that everyone at the time, without needing any explanation, sighed in admiration, thinking it was fitting for the dowry of a princess of the Tokugawa shogunate. This degree of "sameness" also distorts our sense of perspective and makes us dizzy.

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Technologies that manipulate light and electrical signals, and the science fiction visions inspired by them, are things that cannot be physically touched; they are, so to speak, "existing, yet not existing." They are held as physical objects on an extremely thin film—a veritable membrane of reality and illusion. The vessel, clad in an illusory vision that can be seen through layers upon layers of matter and image, is empty inside. The surface is the essence, the everything.