Saya

2022Beginning of Life — Life · Transience

Falling cherry blossoms, a clear stream, waves breaking on the shore, the glow of sea sparkle, a moonlit night sky — moments that hold us still. Their beauty, their fading fragility and the richness of their colors are rendered with a delicate touch.

This interrupts thought and quiets the heart. What appears then is love, and acknowledgement of oneself — and a person awakening to their own true possibility.

Saya hopes her work will always acknowledge the viewer’s heart with clarity, and stay beside them, together with their possibility.

2023Hashoku — Wave Erosion

To express the idea that the accumulation of the past is what shapes us, I created a new word. That word explores how each layer of our history — whether comfortable or bitter — has shaped who we essentially are.

By nature, we are nothing but a mass of possibility. Day by day, that possibility is worn away by past experience. Just as waves erode rock and, before we know it, form a coastline, our own possibility changes too.

Being worn away is neither good nor bad. All of it is ourselves — an experience like embracing the past.

We are eroding ourselves; when we can see our possibility, we can see the wave erosion too. And then, remembering the immense possibility within us, we return to zero.

2024Acceptance

Life is a series of realisations — a journey of searching for oneself. One day, suddenly, a moment comes when we realise that what we believed in — the past and the thinking that protected us — was a fiction that had settled on us like skin, as if it were who we are. In that moment we experience a breakthrough. We become free of the self that was bound by the past, clad in armour, living for the sake of something else.

The past holds pain and setbacks too. But when we can embrace who we were, true release arrives. The past, too, is a precious part of what made us. Accepting the past is the first step to accepting oneself, and it is beyond that step that the boundless possibility of the future opens.

We set out to see the world anew — a journey to look again at the self within. Who is my true self? What do I live for?

I intend my art to be a stimulus and a switch: for people to accept their past and present, to trust themselves, and for their true selves to step out toward the future. The search for oneself is an adventure without end. I hope art can be a partner to live alongside. That is why I paint. People are wonderful just as they are — and for the future.

2024Discover real self

Life is a journey of discovering oneself. Where does my identity come from? The DNA of the people I am rooted in. A sensibility held since ancient times. Traditional culture, lore, and the connections handed down from our ancestors.

We are the culmination of connections. We are alive now through a relay of lives. Try to feel your family, your ancestors, the land, the earth. It comes into view: the answer to the search for oneself is love and gratitude.

2025Live Now

We always live under the influence of our own past. We are never truly free. But what happens when we discover that life means only what we give it — when we discover the cloak of the past we are wearing? Would boundless possibility not appear — the clouds gone, if only for a moment, and a clear sky showing through?

空 Kū: a blank space that spreads without limit. This blank space is the very door that leads us to the infinite.

To live is simply to live “now”. Only the moment called “now” makes a difference. Its accumulation shapes the future. The future is not a goal at the top of some special mountain; there is only ever “now”. Our journey does not seek an end; it colors each moment as it comes. In the open blank of Kū, we paint our own possibility, our own colors. For there is no time to live but now.

2025Motion and Stillness, Power and Nobility

The time has come to awaken to the dignity, stillness and strength within us — that beautiful spirit — to acknowledge ourselves and be proud. Through past experience, people shape themselves to fit society and others. To hide the self they do not want to show, they play the strong one, the clever one or the good person — or, the other way round, pretend to have no ability.

What we took to be ourselves is in fact an illusion we made from past experience — nothing more than a play we wrote and acted ourselves. And no one is interested in the you who is performing. It does not matter at all.

Now is the time to shed the shell born of that past, and let go of the self-staged past. Then the stillness that accepts ourselves, freedom, and the blank space of possibility — 空 Kū — appear, and power wells up from within. Nothing can stop it. Believe in yourself, and live.

In the Japanese tradition of depicting clouds and waves, opposites coexist: stillness and motion, yin and yang. Neither is lacking; they keep their balance and give form to the universe. People, too, hold together their everyday self and the self of possibility. Only when we accept both is true self-acknowledgement born.

2025Shu no Mai — Dance of Vermilion

Protection from evil, power, energy — vermilion is a color the Japanese have treasured since ancient times. Its energy lives on in traditional culture and faith: an eternal color handed down, unbroken, even to us today.

That we are endowed with deep history, culture, dignity and spirit. That we are connected to something greater.

You need no courage. Believing in your true self is what makes the difference.

2025Inner Power

Are you living your life by your own will? Most would answer that they believe so. My life is my own! I have that power! Declare it — at any time, from that very moment.

2025Wa and Rock

Inspired by the stillness and motion, the yin and yang, found in Japanese art, Saya creates works that fuse “Wa” — Japanese harmony — with “Rock”, while drawing on classical motifs. She uses sumi ink, acrylic, resin, crystal powder and fragments of meteorite as painting materials in innovative ways, raising them into contemporary art.

Her work is an invitation to accept both sides of a person — the everyday self and the self of possibility — and to live “now” as one’s true self. It is the realm of 空 Kū, freed from thought and the past: the discovery of an entirely new energy of the self.

Her work is an invitation to an awareness: the moments of life continue without pause, and there is no time to live but now.

2026Trace of Time

I am drawn to the changes that appear in matter over time — the changes that time itself works. Organic matter rots, decomposes and becomes new matter. Metal corrodes, and its surface changes. The time inscribed by the life of a great tree hundreds of years old; stone that has stayed there, unchanged, for thousands, tens of thousands of years. I hold such presences in reverence.

From the moment we are born, we are living toward death. Each of us has a timer. Trees, flowers, people — each has its own allotted time. They bud, bloom, in time decay, and change form. Nature, meanwhile, embraces even that life and death, and simply goes on being, overwhelmingly.

Before that overwhelming presence, something that covers us falls away, and we notice the quiet realm of 空 Kū that exists within us too. Kū is the place where, released from past experience and the judgement of others, we return to our true selves. And it is also a place that holds the possibility of still becoming anyone at all.

Not denying the history we have walked, but accepting all of it, and acknowledging our true self — not a pretence. Only then are the power and creativity we were born with set free.