In 2006, while the Winter Olympics were in full swing in Turin, a city in northern Italy, I was in Milan, also in northern Italy, researching the techniques of 16th-century Christian painting. I was attracted to the texture of the paintings when many painters first started using oil paints.

I visited many murals and churches, then holed myself up in my apartment, recreating the techniques of the time by layering oil paint over tempera, trying to see how it looked and what the paint was like. I was trying to connect it to my own modern expression. It was a very precious time.

Now that I’ve returned to Japan, and many years have passed, I’m slowly getting better at looking back on that time. I still enjoy researching techniques, but I’ve never been able to delve into the essential content of religious paintings, and my memories of the authoritarian Catholic Church have begun to feel like something from another world. It was the autumn of 2024. I went on a short trip to Hirado, about a two-hour drive from my hometown of Nagasaki. On the way, I visited Sotome-cho, a village of hidden Christians, and saw a group of small, simple churches built in the Meiji and Taisho periods after Christian persecution was over. There, prayer is part of daily life, and the small churches with their simple appearances were all carefully made and beautiful. I wanted to paint a picture like this.

Every day, I too pray without making any wish for anything, and put my hands together in front of a photograph of my father from his youth, which serves as a kind of funeral portrait. I want to create drawings on paper, as if I were putting my hands together in prayer, as if it were such an ordinary thing to do. I would like to make this a small exhibition like that.