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Concept

Jo Katayama creates her works using a dyeing technique that adds her own unique skill to wax dyeing. The dyeing process is carefully planned and repeated many times with many restrictions, and Katayama's skill and ability to accomplish it make it possible to create layers of patterns and delicate expressions of her works. Unlike painting, "dyeing" does not produce unevenness on the surface even if colors are layered. However, the colors layered over and over soak into the threads, and traces of trial and error in the production process appear on the surface of the fabric, creating the transparent colors and soft, deep expressions that only dyes can produce.

I hope my paintings will be a device for escaping reality and returning to solitude, for facing oneself and cooling down. I paint ordinary landscapes with the comfort I feel from my own experience. I believe that each person has his or her own moment when he or she can receive a pleasant impression of freedom from the tedium of daily life, not only from a physical angle, but also from various factors such as the point of view, light, temperature, humidity, and emotions at that moment. I want to represent those moments when even ordinary objects resonate with us based on our experiences and give us a special feeling." --- Jo Katayama

The dots scattered throughout the work are designs created by traces of freehand drawing using wax. The motifs are simple, yet arranged at exquisite intervals without interfering with each other, giving the viewer a sense of the comfortable passage of time, and the changes in the size of the motifs, large and small, are designed to create a stronger emotional swing and visual effect.

Katayama believes that there is an overlap between his own ineffective method of production and the days of writhing and suffering in a society where there are no do-overs and many ties. Even so, Katayama is able to get new ideas by interacting with the phenomena in front of him, and in this day and age when many people have a hard time living, he is allowed to face the work itself and be there with it as a landscape. I would like to create a comfortable space without a sense of rejection with the light colors of dyeing expression.