Gallery
M.A.S.
I started the Miniature Atelier Series, or M.A.S., in 2010. Here I have been reconstructing the tools and materials I use when I create my main artworks. Most of the world's industrial goods are standardized at sizes proportional to "average" humans. It is no exaggeration to say that our concepts, too, are configured on a scale whose core is the "food, clothing, and shelter" essential for our daily lives. Terms like "efficiency" and "convenience," for example, are defined in three-dimensional spaces at sizes just right for our lives; doing so enables these terms to gain their full significance for us.
These are the underpinning thoughts for my M.A.S. series, created based on the theme of "scale." These works aim to stimulate visual interest, as expression on a smaller scale softens the uncouth nature inherent in "tools," while the size differences evoke sensations of strangeness, and jar changes in our mundane images.
My scale for the M.A.S. series is set at 1:10. This scale is "reverse calculated" from the smallest unit I need for easy and speedy
setting in iron of female-thread screw holes; these are used to set standard M2 screws, the screws most frequently found in my works.
I have adopted the 1:10 scale also because this size enables me to use screws in these miniature items without breakage; it is just about as small as I can go to ensure that these small-scale tools can still be manipulated like their real counterparts.
The motif of tools I use to remind myself, too, of the point of origin of all my created works. Seeing tools reminds me of the changes each tool undergoes, and of all the changes tools have undergone, through the years—my eyes are opened to the wisdom of ancestral toolmakers. Adding savor to this admiration is surely a subliminal sense encompassing the numerous uses I have made of tools, that personal background of exploring their diversity and usability. Tools have thus chiseled and hammered and dug their presence into my unconscious. This has been my lot in life, and my joy.
Translated by Robert Plautz
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