Midori Arai, born in Ibaraki, Japan in 1992, graduated from Tokyo Zokei University in 2015 with a bachelor’s degree in fine arts. She completed a master’s degree in oil painting at Kyoto University of The Arts in 2022. Arai has developed the infinite possibilities of paintings by applying to finite physical acts and gestures. The viewer can relive the physical acts and strokes through the work, expressing the nature of life and time.

 

Repeating unconscious “movements” and reinterpreting them.
The finiteness of the body and the infinity of the painting are inherent in the stroke,which are both a component of the action and the trace.
In Roland Barthes’s essay “Cy Twombly: Works on Paper”,there is a part that goes like this: “only hand guides him, or that hand’s desire, not its instrumental aptitude; the eye is reason, evidence, empiricism, verisimilitude everything which serves to control, to coordinate, to imitate[ ··· ]. TW’s work reveals this fatality: my body will never be yours.”
Draw with the hands, not with the eyes. Draw with the memory of the body, not the memory of the consciousness. That is breathing, blinking, and beating of the heart . This body of mine which moves unconsciously does not live with a clear intention of its own but is being kept alive.
You come in touch with your finitude through the traces of time.