Guest Artist: Mikako Ohmatsu, Tokyo University of the Arts
Mikako Ohmatsu, Faded Horse, 2024
My name is Mikako Ohmatsu, and I am currently studying in the Department of Oil Painting at Tokyo University of the Arts.
I create works that explore the themes of memory and poetic sensibility.
My focus is on fading memories, those that can no longer be recalled, and the human efforts to preserve them.
My work visually expresses these intangible moments—perhaps even as a quiet dialogue with the traces they leave behind.
To me, memory resembles a piece of fruit plucked from a branch.
Over time, it decays and disappears.
Though we cannot witness the exact moment of disappearance, what remains may be a seed, or a broken twig that once connected it to the tree.
I find myself trying to recreate and decipher these remnants—perhaps even the lingering juice or faint scent left behind.
When I envision a work, the method of its making often emerges alongside the image.
This is likely because the process itself plays a vital role as a means of accessing memory.
As I follow the imagined method and move my hands, I feel as though I am touching that dried seed, inhaling a scent from long ago.
Faded Horse
Photo of a horse, locket pendant, 2024
This piece uses an old photo of a horse I found in my digital storage.
I cut out the image and placed it inside a locket pendant.
Inspired by the act of carrying something delicate and ephemeral, I sought to express a condition in which things twist and fall apart.
The process of combining fragments into a fragile new form—one that wavers between transformation and preservation—mirrors the shifting stream of thought that arises when remembering a particular scene.
Incorporating the locket pendants as a material element in my work further embodies the symbolic sentiment of the images retrieved from my personal archives.
Ghost Tails / Tales
Canvas, acrylic, pigskin, 2024
Mikako Ohmatsu, Ghost Tails/Tales, 2024
This work also uses photos retrieved from my personal storage, overlaid with translucent pigskin.
The people in the photos are close to me—mostly family. Unlike the horse by the sea, they are figures whose transformations I continue to witness.
It is precisely because I can still witness these changes that I become sharply aware of what I can no longer recall.
What I remember is not the past itself, but the present version of myself—one that has also shifted over time.
In this piece, I attempt to look at the unreachable past through the body of the present “me,”a body that once existed there with undeniable physical presence.
I render these observations on the canvas in soft overlapping layers of paint to portray the shifting depictions of the person’s presence in image and memory. The overlapping skin conceals the depiction adding a distorted film of resonance.