In an age where belonging feels increasingly fluid, I explore what it means to search for a place to stand when every border seems to shift. My generation has grown up amid expanding diversity, where national or cultural identity has become less definitive, and individuality is often seen as the truest form of identity. Yet after ten years in the United States, I’ve come to realize that my sense of origin—Japan—remains deeply rooted within me, even as that very homeland continues to change.

This awareness of transformation, both within myself and within the world I once called home, shapes my current body of work. By combining fragments of digital culture and advertising with classical painting forms, I aim to visualize the tension between what fades and what endures. The works question how we define stability in an era when boundaries constantly shift and overlap.

Through images of flowers and butterflies—symbols of vanitas and resurrection—alongside traces of the painting process itself, I seek to depict the fragile balance between loss and renewal. I reveal painting not as a finished product, but as an ongoing act of searching—a way to find belonging in the very state of uncertainty.