Death is one of the four inevitable sufferings that the Buddha preached. I focused on "death" among them and expressed the skull as a tofu relief. Tofu originated in China and is now widely used as a daily food in many countries. On the other hand, although death is not inevitable and can come to anyone anywhere in the world, we treat it like something special and avoid thinking about it in our daily lives. In 2017, I drew a skull for the first time in a work titled "Moment-2", which uses a courtesan as a motif. Until then, it was taboo for me to draw or create skeletons. This is because I felt negative energy, including death, in skeletons. But by observing and drawing the skull, the kind of fear I had disappeared. In my work, "Woman", I realized that if the skin and muscles were removed, everyone would have ivory bones, regardless of race or gender. Since then, the skeleton has become a symbol of non-discrimination for me. In this work, I combined a skull with tofu, a daily food, to express that death is part of our lives.I think that accepting the impermanence and insubstantiality of our life will lead to peace of mind, rather than being afraid and not thinking about it.
