NOBUTAKA KATSUYAMA

I was born the first son of a Buddhist priest and became one, like my father, when I was 24 years old. I grew up seeing Buddhist culture at my father’s temple, which influenced my artwork. I studied printmaking at Kyoto City University of Art. The theme of my art, “Sense of Evanescence,” is not only the fundamental principle of Buddhism but also my natural feeling about the life I am living in the 21st Century. I see the truth of life in the fact that nothing stays the same.

One of the traditional Japanese values of living states that things are beautiful because they cannot be everlasting. My sense of beauty has a root in this value, and when I see a crack on a historic Buddhist statue in a temple, I see that it is beautiful just the way it is. Therefore I intentionally use medical wafers (which are very frail and create cracks and peels on the surface) to emphasize the process of decaying. And this attempt has the role of letting the different vector emerge on the painting. Experiencing big economical shifts last year, people in the world are going through a lot of change. I do not mean I encourage the decay of stable life, but I do see the truth of the universe in the balance between prosperity and decay, light and dark, completion and collapse, and so on. I believe my work stimulates the sense of letting go and accepting change.