Momoka Kawashima

Kawashima Momoka works across paintings, installations, and poems, centering on the question “Is it possible to continue to love others without substance after loss has occurred?”

Kawashima Momoka works across paintings, installations, and poems, centering on the question “Is it possible to continue to love others without substance after loss has occurred?”

How do we keep remembering others?
When the absence of others becomes decisive, how does that outline transform and continue to stay within us?
In Kawashima's works, the entity called “you” goes beyond mere individual existence and indicates “the absence of others itself.”

In recent years, I have been exploring production methods that transform the images and atmosphere of words into paintings and installations, starting from poetry and text. While being aware of the “translation misalignment” that occurs between the figurativeness of words and the nonverbal nature of paintings, the work is carried out in such a way as to trace the contours of memory and loss.

In “I'll declare here and now that we won't let anyone overrun our chosen survival” announced in 2025, the promise with “you” was visualized through the act of pressing fingerprints on 800 earthquake-resistant mats as “proof that we have continued to survive for 800 days.”
Fingerprints are symbols that identify individuals, yet they have a function that supports our actions due to their slight unevenness.
In this work, fingerprints are captured as a “drawing act,” and by continuing to push them against an earthquake-resistant mat, it is a “proof” that I continued to survive for 800 days. However, now that we have reached the 800th day, those fingerprints may have kept “you” away and transformed into something that affirms my own survival — that question is connected to current production.

In the new production, while reconsidering the relationship between poetry and painting, they are searching for painting as a means to record the absence of “you.”
In poetry, is it possible to face the absence of others by continuing the dialogue between “you” and “I”?
Can paintings created starting from poetry open up new possibilities for dialogue by having their own “place”?
When the boundary between self and others becomes blurred, to what extent are “memories of others” maintained?

While facing these questions, Kawashima continues to explore “the state of others after loss.”