■Comments on Participating in Roppongi Art Night

When I was in my twenties, I took a boat trip to the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. Besides it being my first time diving, I was mesmerized by a crystal-clear world teeming with nearly two-meter-long sharks and a remote island full of hundreds of monitor lizards. Among these many experiences, there was one particular landscape and location that had a strong and vivid impact on me. It was the graveyard of ships. I was told that this was a place where shipowners, looking to cash in on insurance money, intentionally ran their old ships aground to receive compensation. Dozens of large tankers lie stranded and abandoned in the middle of the ocean, where there is nothing to be seen for a full 360 degrees. Among these was an old wreck that looked like a ghost ship from Pirates of the Caribbean, and against the setting sun it made for a strange world that seemed unreal. That moment set off my imagination, eventually becoming the impetus for this project. I imagined those tankers becoming unmoored from their resting places by storms and typhoons, left to wander the world’s oceans. Migratory birds would stop to rest, and the creatures and plants they brought with them would put down roots and eventually become a forest that would overtake the entire ship. Flora and fauna from all over the world would continue to grow on the tanker, creating a large and self-contained ecosystem. It is with this grand and detailed fantasy that the tanker project began.

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