I think many of us have the childhood memory of digging a tunnel in a sandbox and finally reaching the other person’s hand, who has been digging from the opposite side. That sudden feeling of breakthrough still occasionally resurfaces in my mind, even today, in the very moment of crossing boundaries.

Take, for example, when I read Natsume Soseki’s The Three-Cornered World. Set in the late Meiji period with a Western-style painter as the protagonist, it references many real-life artists, including Nagasawa Rosetsu, Ito Jakuchu, Iwasa Matabee, John Everett Millais, and William Turner. One of the main topics is the controversy over nude paintings that was causing a stir at the time, amid Japan’s Westernization. The story’s gossip-laden, flashy energy captivated me, which is why I—then an undergraduate literary student—chose to study it for my thesis. As a result, I came to understand how the protagonist—whom I stipulate to be a watercolor artist—fails for the moment to grasp Western culture, and how he attempts to interpret Western paintings in terms of literati painting. Reading the novel from an art-historical perspective allowed me to overlay the lived experience of a person from that period onto both literature and art history.

In graduate school, I researched manga and pondered, for example, what kind of painting manga would be if we treated them as such. (I discovered that they stretch and shrink like elastic bands, contain unlimited information, allow us to go in and out of them, and are cheap yet space-consuming paintings.) (It would take too much space to fully explain this here, so I’ll save it for another time.)

I have always had the conviction that if I dig from my side of the tunnel—that is, contemporary art, which has become my profession—I can connect, somewhere in the middle of the mountain, with someone digging from the other side, whether it is the field of “media,” “region art,” “disabilities studies,” “urban development,” “new kind of spaces,” or any other domain.

Kanazawa Kodama (Translated by Wada Taiyo)