Ai Natori

Blue — the colour of the sea from which life first came, and also the colour of a death that has lost its warmth. That it can hold such opposing images seems to me a sign that life and death each contain the other. These two things sway and intersect, at times trying to become one; it is a colour that holds the sense of an ever-changing instant, and that is why so many people, myself included, are drawn to it, trying through it to sublimate many different feelings, searching through it for something. After the earthquake of 2011, the vague sense of that instant that I had always carried took on clear shape, and because of it the world I live in came to feel stronger and more beautiful to me. Through a blue world I want to paint the strength and beauty of that fleeting instant where environment and self, I and other, sway and intersect.