SOULSCAPE
In front of the house where I was born and raised, rice paddies stretched about 50 meters away. Beyond that was a steep slope of a thicket that acted like a blind. At some point, the rice paddies stopped being used and have now become like a field, but anyway, this is my original landscape. Strange creatures wriggled in both the rice paddies and the thicket, and wherever I looked, there were plants with mysterious shapes. The organic things I saw like that are the archetypes of everything to me.
In contrast to the peaceful outside scenery, the inside of the house was a space dominated by tension. My father, who had complicated problems, was there, and if something displeased him, he would be violent toward my much older mother. As a child, I was just scared and confused. The term 'domestic violence' did not exist yet; what existed was twisted control and absurdity.
Until I stopped coming home in my mid-teens, drawing was an escape, resistance, and a fragile means of protecting myself.
I started drawing again the month after the 9/11 terrorist attacks happened in the United States. It was my fourth year after graduating from university, and I was working as a translation copyright agent linking English-language novels to publication in Japan. New York is the center of commercial publishing in the US and a major hub of global publishing culture. Half of the colleagues I met through work were in New York. The shock and confusion were tremendous, and I couldn't focus on anything. Several personal circumstances overlapped, and something inside me broke down.
Strange shapes began to appear one after another from my work notebook and ballpoint pen, and I even suspected that my brain had finally broken. I went on a business trip to New York two months after the terrorist attack, and from then on, I couldn't stop drawing.
I have known since my childhood that no matter how many pictures I draw, violence and absurdity will not stop. However, I also learned later in life that showing an attitude, even by indirect means, is not necessarily meaningless.
May 2025
Mario Tauchi
