Rome

In 1976, at Tokyo's Haneda Airport, I boarded a plane for Rome with a single suitcase, and upon my arrival I was immediately overwhelmed by the dense fabric of ancient monuments. Cars and buses sped past them and over them, while the Romans went about their daily lives completely unfazed. This city, where traces of the past and the profane everyday life of the present can coexist without difficulty, captivated me entirely. I had left Japan with the clearly defined goal of studying at the Academy of Fine Arts, yet I realized that I had encountered something far greater, and so I spent my first years creating within myself the space needed to absorb this other culture, so foreign to me.

I love Rome above all during my nightly walks, when the churches are illuminated and the paved squares no longer have anything in common with the dusty confusion of the day. In the silence of the night, the lit monuments rise out of the darkness and return to their innermost powerful form. I also take great pleasure in wandering through the ruins just outside the city, where I very often walk entirely alone among the abandoned and sublime monuments. On the paving stones, my footsteps sound light and rhythmic, like the second hand moving in the opposite direction, leading me back into that past which here offers me its ancient treasures: each individual stone, consumed by time, comes back to life and begins to tell me its story.

As early as 1980, I began to render these personal impressions of Rome one after another in bronze. Rome was the point of departure; afterward I cast Venetian, Sicilian, and Spanish landscapes in bronze and presented these works in my exhibitions.