Before she is an individual, a shaman is foremost a vehicle for receiving and expressing the grief and indignation of the people within society. The otherworldly strength that you see during a gut is the raging effort to forget and overcome the weakness of the self and is possible because it bears all the wrath and indignation of the people against oppression. Extraordinary acts performed with remarkable exaggeration encounter the human instinct to demolish one's own limitations, producing catharsis.

If you are born a female and live as one, you can't deny your connection to feminism. I think if you are a female, you are a feminist. As far as my work goes, I don't want it to be interpreted solely from a feminist perspective, of course, but for a woman to have no interest in feminism or say that it doesn't concern her is self-denial. I know that sexism still exists within various societies and systems, whether blatantly or subtly. We are, however, much better off than previous generations.

In my work, hair denotes the flow of life prior to being freed from pain. I fill the hair with human struggles such as deep-rooted anxieties, stubborn attachment to life, obsessions, and restrictions. Appearing fluid like a live organism, the hair symbolizes longevity and patience, but when it appears coarse, the hair expresses an energetic life force and freedom.

Black does not signify the darkness related to death or nothingness, but a darkness that combines everything and holds the possibility of creation, a temporary death that embraces rebirth.

Sound words can't be understood through formal study of the language alone. They're felt when you immerse yourself in the culture or lifestyle that becomes a part of you. The Japanese language is abundant with onomatopoeia. Even though I've lived in Japan a long time, sound words are still an uncertain territory. And I think new words are being created every day. Even when I don't know a word I can sometimes connect it to a meaning using the sensations produced by the sounds, which feels like I'm playing with words.

The subjects in my work appear as unidentified ghosts that can't be said to be of this world. I've decided to call them incarnations. In various religions, myths, and legends, the word "incarnation" refers to the birth or emergence of transcendent beings in the form of humans or other bodies. If "incarnation" denotes the appearance of an abstract being in some concrete form, in a gut ceremony, a shaman could be considered an incarnation of our desires, hopes, and sorrows. The incarnations that appear in my work are always new and I meet them for the first time by drawing them.

Shamanism has a long history and exists to this day because of its ties to universal emotions such as happiness, sorrow, resentment, and love. It can function as an outlet during struggles with life and death and the burdens of society's absurdities including the divide between rich and poor. It opens up a way to confront reality.