You are quiet like a cat, sometimes lively, and against the fate that falls upon you I can do nothing at all for you. I can only face the white canvas and the lace of thin, frail mesh that spreads like the universe, and accept everything. Tsuyoshi Sera The drawing of a woman with the face of a frog, affixed inside a wooden frame, is gently enveloped, as if sealed, in delicate lace fabric. In the paintings born through his own experiences and memories, lace covers abstracted motifs, is embedded in them, and at times is torn away. The works of Tsuyoshi Sera, which have so far dealt with the repetition of life and death that has continued since ancient times as their theme, and above all with living, that is, the form in which life exists now, are currently made with the use of lace as their characteristic. The history of lace is said to have begun in ancient Egypt and passed to Europe; at first, used for instance in the decoration of armor, it was in greater demand among men than among women and belonged to the privileged classes, but with the development of manufacturing techniques it spread to the general public and came to be used abundantly in fashion. Now it has become an indispensable part of women's underwear and has melted into everyday life so much that one is not even aware of its existence. This transition is also like the one that art has followed until now; moreover, in addition to romantic and feminine, neat or sexy images, inspiration is provoked by its delicate appearance and its distinctive effects of light; the branching of the fine mesh, thin, frail and wavering, somehow calls to mind a human life, and the regularly arranged geometric patterns also look like a mandala, leading into the infinitely expanding universe. 【Artist profile】 Born in 1974. Spent his boyhood in a remote part of the Shimane countryside, familiar with traditional Buddhist customs and practices, Iwami Kagura and myths. He began drawing from an early age, and was influenced by Japanese manga and, through art education in the countryside, by the typical Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Abstract Expressionism and Neo-Expressionism. His activity began in earnest during his university years: while studying at Osaka University of Foreign Studies, he researched where human image-formation comes from, taking imaginary beings (mainly yokai and the like) as his subject and comparing Japan and abroad; then, in 2000, he studied fine art at the National Art School in Australia, and has continued to make work in the field of contemporary art while moving his base between Osaka, Sydney and Tokyo. The Buddhist idea of reincarnation that has influenced him since childhood runs through the core of his works, and a cosmic sense of endless repetition also appears in his brushwork and colors. As mentioned above, he works with 'life and death' as his theme by gazing at present 'life', and has reconsidered and constructed image, space, color, time, people, things, relationships and so on. The frog that appears in his works, prompted by the death of someone close to him, is 'the frog glared at by a snake', unable to move a muscle; he likens this state to human life = destiny, expressing a reality in which one has no choice but to accept both good and bad, and, taking as subject 'Yamata no Orochi', the eight-headed serpent of one of Shimane's myths, he symbolizes 'the figure of surviving the present'. At times, drawing on various experiences, he takes as motifs fragments of cheap everyday things and trivial events around him, awakening people to their own possibilities, finding the beauty hidden in banal phenomena, and creating contexts in which new relationships are formed and meaning is gained. This is close to the current of Micropop, a concept proposed by the art critic Midori Matsui, one tendency of artistic expression that appeared in Japan from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s. However, rather than depicting the everyday as everyday, he depicts an ambiguous world that is both figurative and abstract, and by further covering it with lace, the 'ambiguous world' fixed there becomes even more ambiguous. The shadows produced by the lace change depending on the place of viewing; at the same time as sensing the possibilities of a life wrapped in a veil, viewers, as if touched by fragments of past memories and thoughts, feel welling up in them the thought 'I have seen this somewhere', 'I have done this', and can enter into the work; it permeates further the images each person creates, and draws out the empathy of people living in contemporary society. (Tsuyoshi Sera)