In a literal sense, the Azumatei Project was ushered into this world through the blood, sweat, and tears of Takuro Ishii and myself. We took turns behind the wheel of a minitruck, ferrying five plywood panels up three old flights of stairs, manning a circular saw until covered in dust and wood chips at midnight, sedulously smearing the ceiling with paint. Although I had already known Ishii for nearly a decade by that point, the experience forged a new bond, and a more intimate understanding of him as an individual. In short, he is tough as nails. We all have moments in which our neurons are stimulated and some “switch” inside us is activated. I find that the more a subject aligns with my fields of interest and specialization, the more I can focus on the work with all the fibers of my being. Ishii, however, is cut from a different, rarer cloth entirely. It seems that he is always “on,” operating on omnidirectional full throttle.

The old painter in Shinri Sensei, a novel by Saneatsu Mushanokoji, was searching for the truth (“shinri”) by solely painting stones day after day. At our first exhibition, Memento Mori, Ishii selected a precious few stones from the countless rocks by a river, only to shatter them, hollowing them out one by one, and joining them back into one empty stone for presentation as his new work. A Japanese proverb touting the virtue of perseverance counsels, "even a stone will get warm if a person sits on it for three years." But as I recall the precedent set by Ishii's longtime stone sculpturing and the old painter in Shinri Sensei, I realize that we have only just begun, and there is still a promisingly long road yet ahead. 

Jun Azumatei (contemporary artist)