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Crowd Series
The gaze converges, and existence resides only here.
The trilogy unfolded through Crowd, After the Crowd, and ,and crowd lost..
In Crowd, the entire space was filled with overwhelming writing, presenting the totality of the collective. After the Crowd dismantled this whole and reconfigured it into countless smaller works. Finally, in ,and crowd lost., cubic forms scaled to the artist’s own body were enveloped inside and out with writing, symbolizing the shift from the individual to the self.
Together, these works trace a trajectory from the collective to the individual, and from the individual to the self, fundamentally re-examining the nature of existence and relationality.
《Crowd》
《After the Crowd》
《,and crowd lost.》
【Crowded Series — Exhibition Notes】
The Crowd series (2005) is an inquiry into the fundamental nature of calligraphy, explored through the transitions of “from crowd to individual,” “from exterior to interior,” and “from meaning to act and phenomenon.”
The Crowd series constituted a fundamental site of exploration in which the artist sought to move beyond the semantic function of writing and return to “the line itself.” It questioned the existence of the individual submerged within the crowd, the liberation from written characters as mere signs, and the essence of the act of writing itself.
In its earliest stage, the overwhelming presence of the collective was visualized through the motifs of whales and schools of fish. The following stage fragmented this collectivity, dividing it into individual pieces that were presented as independent works—an attempt to reduce the whole to the singular. Its final stage employed a cube scaled to the artist’s own body, entirely covered with writing on both its interior and exterior surfaces, revealing the solitary viewpoint of the “self” that remains after the dissolution of the crowd.
This sequence of works—“from crowd to individual,” “from exterior to interior,” and “from meaning to act and phenomenon”—unearthed the ontological questions inherent in calligraphy. What is calligraphy? What should be pursued as its essence? The Crowd series provided a crucial opportunity for the artist to confront these fundamental questions, marking a turning point in her creative trajectory.
Crowd
April 2005
Crowd
Venue: Transgenre, Shin-Puh-Kan 3F (Kyoto, Japan)
— A monumental work that filled the space and presented the total image of the “crowd.”
Created in 2005 after years of training within the calligraphic establishment, Crowd was produced as the artist began questioning conventional modes of expression. Its background lay in a critical perspective on the ossified forms of calligraphy and the suppression of individuality within the collective. The motif of the whale derived from two overlapping experiences: a childhood dream in which an immense whale—so vast as to be unrecognizable in its entirety—swam through her mind and overwhelmed her with fear, and a later scene from a film showing a whale engulfing a school of sardines.
Through this conjunction of memories, the whale—an image seemingly distant from calligraphy—emerged as a catalyst for transformation. The exhibition featured a life-sized, ten-meter whale suspended from the ceiling, its interior collaged with fragments of the artist’s earlier training works, torn apart as an act symbolizing departure from the past and the embrace of a new beginning. A school of sardines, rendered in woodblock prints, and a “crowd of characters” formed by layering numerous written words into geometric patterns were also displayed. Together, these elements contrasted the whale, the sardines, and the mass of characters to visualize the tension between the individual and the collective, between existence and submersion.
【Venue Photographs】
Whale
Dimensions: Length 1000 cm × Width (Body) 188 cm
Materials: Sumi ink on torinoko paper
Dimensions: H 550 cm × W 188 cm × 5 sheets
Materials: Sumi ink on torinoko paper
After the Crowd
September 2005
After the Crowd
Venue: Gallery Haneusagi (Kyoto, Japan)
— Deconstructed Crowd and reconfigured it into countless small-scale works.
After the Crowd, presented in September 2005 at Gallery Haneusagi in Kyoto, deconstructed Crowd and reconfigured it into a multitude of small-scale works. Four monumental panels, each 188 × 550 cm, depicting the “crowd of characters” from Crowd, were cut apart and divided into 432 fragments of 10 × 10 cm, which were then arranged according to the exhibition space. What had been presented as a collective image of the “crowd” was reframed as a series of independent works, effecting a transition from the whole to the singular.
At the same time, while retaining the same motif, the work emphasized not the written lines of characters but rather the excised lines of absence, allowing a new mode of the line to emerge from the very lack of writing. The fragments, created on cloth dyed with sumi ink through the technique of wax-resist dyeing (rōketsuzome), embodied both the memory of the whole and their own autonomous presence, inviting the viewer to engage at close range. The contrast between the monumental scale of the original and the intimacy of each fragment revealed a new relationship between calligraphy and space.
【Venue Photographs】
Dimensions: Length 1000 cm × Width 45 cm × 3 pieces
Materials: Cotton (batik dyeing)
Dimensions: Each unit 10 cm × 10 cm × 5 cm, total 432 units
,and crowd lost.
December 2005
,and crowd lost.
Venue: Gallery Kura + Kyoto SHIPS MEN’S (Kyoto, Japan)
— A cube scaled to the artist’s own body, entirely covered with characters on both its interior and exterior surfaces, symbolizing the shift from the individual to the “self.”
Presented in December 2005 at Gallery Kura and Kyoto SHIPS MEN’S, ,and crowd lost. was conceived as the concluding work of the Crowd series. It featured a cube scaled to the artist’s own body, entirely covered with characters on both its interior and exterior surfaces. Viewers encountered the dense volume from the outside while simultaneously being prompted to imagine the viewpoint concealed within.
Where Crowd had foregrounded the collective structure of the “crowd,” this work dismantled that structure and reduced it to the individual, returning ultimately to the “self” as subject. What emerges after the crowd is lost is the singular body that continues to exist beyond relations with others, and the inward gaze of the “self” that lies within. By demonstrating the transition from the crowd to the individual and finally to the self, this work assumes a summative position within the series.
This transition became a decisive moment in which the artist re-examined the foundations of her calligraphic expression. It subsequently led to the Crowded series, marking an important threshold where she began to recognize the core of what she sought to pursue in calligraphy.
【Venue Photographs】
Dimensions: 150 cm × 150 cm × 150 cm
Materials: Exterior: Plywood, paint, sumi ink; Interior: Gasen paper, sumi ink