"Art is the ability to turn one's gaze to the world of oblivion." This is the way in which I understand art at fundamental level.

Taking photographs is generally an act of 'looking at the object, whereas 'being seen' or 'showing' is what is most interest to one who does a self-portrait...self-portraits deny not only photography itself but the 20th century as an era as well...an inevitable phenomenon at the end of the 20th century.

Of course, I, like the sponsoring government, would like to have as many people as possible visit Yokohama Triennale. This is because I believe that art should not be monopolized by professionals and specialists.

I first wrote down all the phenomena that have emerged in contemporary society that I thought were related to this theme ["sea of oblivion"], and then sorted them out by grouping them into islands of ideas.

When we talk about contemporary art and contemporary artists, we usually imagine artists who are alive. But I feel very uncomfortable about placing a border between living artists and dead artists.

By putting a border line between life and death, we separate the world of death from our world of life, casting the dead away into the "world of oblivion".

In Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury raised cautions against mass media, especially the television, which dumb down human sensibilities and coerce everybody's thoughts into a single uniform value, allowing human to forget the fundamental action of "having one's opinion". As a result, the society deteriorates. I decided to exhibit [Edward] Kienholz's work which features television as its subject, as well as the Big Double Cross as works that represent this warning.