Statement

I had the thought that by putting my own activity into words I would become bound by them and no longer be able to express what I want to express, but I felt that the following matters 1) are important as an anchor for looking back on myself, and 2) have a sufficiently wide field even if they limit the breadth of my inquiry, so I decided to set them down here as a statement.

Beginnings

The time I decided to paint in earnest goes back to when I was an engineer of paint applications. It was just when AI-generated artworks were beginning to flood the internet, and we had to face the question of why we paint by hand in the first place, what is the meaning of painting by hand.

At the time, and perhaps still now, a fierce antipathy toward AI art had spread among artists, and I recall that it was a mixed bag, with all kinds of opinions among both those for and against. I, for my part, was thinking about it too, but no answer came, and I kept thinking about it for months.

I would carry a notepad and walk all day, over and over writing down what came to me and thinking it through. One day, while I sat thinking on a bench during a walk in Yoyogi Park, it began to snow, and before I knew it snow had piled up on my head, and a foreign tourist who found that amusing took a photo of me.

Tempera

When making paint applications I sometimes tried out art materials, touching and trying a little of each of various materials, and it was then that I encountered tempera.

Whereas until then, however much I thought, I could not get the sense that something sat right with me, I remember that with tempera, the moment I tried it, I gained the conviction that this was right.

What was strange about this was that the sense of being right that tempera had was stronger than the matters I had racked my brains over so much, which I should have properly told apart, this matter differing from that matter and so on, and furthermore understood clearly by setting out a line of reasoning.

Being right

When I became aware of this sense of being right, I realized that the question I had been thinking about, "What is the meaning of painting by hand?", did not actually originate from myself.

It seems to me that reason has, inherent in it, a nature of running on its own regardless of whether it is right or not for each individual. Reason borrows our bodies and our power of thought to lead its own ideas to conclusions, but it does not go along with the wishes of its host.

To obtain a solution whose consequence feels authentic, I think we must carefully examine this being right, which gives a norm to reason.

So I thought it was important to approach the true nature of this being right, which grants grounds to all matters.

Pseudotheology

There seems to be something mysterious behind this sense of being right. It gives legitimacy to things without the intervention of reason, and yet, even when observed with reason, it keeps leaving behind the conviction that it is right.

What is stranger still is that it is also unclear whether this sense of being right lies inside the I, or outside of me. The conviction seems to be felt within myself, but when I ask about the origin of that conviction itself, I can no longer tell whether it is inside or outside.

Even when I expressed this existence in words, or expressed it abstractly, what was unclear still remained unclear. I wanted to show more concretely what kind of existence this existence is. And so, I was once again greatly lost as to how to handle this existence and how to approach it, but here again tempera gave me a hint.

In 1844 A Treatise on Painting was revived by Merrifield, and since then, though tempera has taken on a modern guise, it still keeps its connection to the religious paintings of the past. The figurative depiction of God and of sacred things expressed in these matched exactly what I had wanted to do.

So, in light of the above circumstances, I tentatively place this mysterious existence of being right as God, and, overlapping it with the question of what God is, I work out what that existence is. I call this back-and-forth attempt Pseudotheology. Because it borrows only the structure of theology and pours a different existence into it, I attached Pseudo to it and made it Pseudotheology.