As cultures become increasingly entangled within another through the fluidity of the pathways of travel, the Internet and other ways of communication and connection, urban centers are becoming increasingly familiar, with a patchwork of intermingling cultural signifiers that then become our everyday lives. With this mixing, so has the traditions, local signifiers and cultural identifiers begun to dissolve into an endangered species, seeming to leave behind a trail of homogenization. However, the realities are not as such. As a Japanese national living in New York, I can only believe that my experience is much like many of those who are now caught within these urban zones. Yet what remains is this struggle between reckoning the familiar local with the familiar global. My work is equally pended as such, between worlds — they are not completely blended, but instead still a patchwork of a controlled chaos trying to evolve into something close to cosmopolitan, yet not so idealized.

What remains are the underlining of specific iconographies that inform our cultural, and, historical past. It is all placed nonsensically into a new context, where I am constantly trying to reinterpret what the image means within a shifting world dialogue.