18”x30” Paintings: Coloured Dyes on Kurotani #04

Lamps: Coloured Dyes on Seichosen Kozo Yotsuban

Screen Divider: Coloured Dyes on Kozuke Ivory

What if digital effects, the airbrush lines, tiled patterns, and soft gradients of early screen worlds, were reimagined through slow, tactile craft? My work investigates this space where digital aesthetics and handmade tradition meet. Using washi paper and dyes, I translate fleeting impressions from early digital imagery into artworks grounded in materiality and slow process.

Patterns are central to this practice. They distill the natural world into symbols, and through repetition and layering, they create immersive environments that function as portals. Viewers step into spaces where memory, craft, and digital culture overlap.

Nostalgia is another underlying theme. Early PlayStation landscapes or blossoms in anime backgrounds were some of my first encounters with digitally rendered nature. They felt like entire worlds I could escape into, and I seek to bring that same sense of wonder into the physical realm.

Ultimately, this collection invites audiences into an in-between world that is digital yet handmade, fleeting yet labor-intensive, playful yet meditative. They become portals into a world that feels both familiar and dreamlike.

The graphics of early 2000s video games and television left a lasting imprint on me. Those worlds were often pixelated and simplified, with skies reduced to gradients, grass and flowers rendered as looping tiles, and water repeating in endless patterns. Though they were non-interactive, these backdrops carried emotional weight. They offered an atmosphere of escape, not realistic but playful, shaped by technological limits that became part of their charm.

Looking back, I see how these early landscapes revealed that worlds could be designed and experienced. They sparked a sense of creative expansiveness, showing me that the boundaries of the real world were not fixed. My hope is that my paintings offer that same transportive joy, a space where viewers feel immersed in a playful world that invites imaginative world building.

Before tattooing, my background was in oil painting and then graphic design. My design background was essential but it taught me how to think digitally. A lot of my sketching and planning still happens in that space, using gradient tools, copy-paste, and opacity sliders.

But when I translate those ideas into painting, the speed of digital tools turns into slow craft. Fading isn’t done with a click, but through brush layering, water control, and pigment transparency. What takes two seconds on a screen becomes hours of soft, careful layers on paper. This process embodies a dual consciousness, where the final image is physical, tactile, and rooted in craft traditions, the conceptual process behind it is deeply informed by digital tools and mindsets.

The way I paint florals also draws on the language of textile design. Like fabric prints, the flowers are distilled into flat, stylized motifs that emphasize shape over realism. Their repetition suggests they could extend infinitely beyond the edge of the paper, much like wallpaper or patterned cloth.

These choices are also inspired by traditional resist dyeing techniques, where floral motifs emerge through the interplay of blocked and released pigment. By referencing these textile traditions, the work carries a timeless sense of craft, honoring methods that long predate digital aesthetics. In my work, florals become both decorative and symbolic, iconic forms that stand at the intersection of old and new.

By drawing from this visual logic, the work connects to the history of decorative arts, from kimonos and textiles to early 2000s floral prints on clothing and stationery. This association deepens the sense of nostalgia while transforming a familiar motif into an immersive environment.

These paintings grow from a longing for the imperfect beauty of nostalgic digital worlds and the tactile presence of handmade craft. I think it’s partly a response to the hyper-realistic, AI-generated images that saturate our daily lives now.

In a moment when digital tools generate perfect images instantly, my work insists on slowness, imperfection, and human touch. By slowing these aesthetics down, I hope to create spaces where viewers can pause, notice subtleties, and experience a kind of meditative state, something that is often lost in the speed of digital life.

I hope to continue this series and build a larger collection of patterns, expanding the world I have started here. I envision an entire room filled with patterned panels and furniture pieces, an immersive space where visitors can be instantly transported into my world.

When I recently stepped back to view the collection, it felt instantly familiar. I realized I had made something like this before. In 2020, I became obsessed with designing patterns in Animal Crossing and filled one of my virtual rooms with wall panels and furniture covered in my motifs.

In a way, I have been unconsciously recreating that same vision in real life. These pieces are not currently for sale, as I hope to keep building this collection until I can one day present the complete world I am creating.