BEAUTifUEL

Beauty is the heart’s act of recognizing it.
The world is inscribed with a grammar that trends toward chaos.
Life, by imposing a fleeting order, manages to keep its heart alive within this world.

White is sunlight pouring down from the sky,
stars shimmering in the night,
drifting clouds, and the spray of the ever-returning waves—
the color of an unruly grammar, of awe.

Unable to fully grasp this grammar,
people have named it gods and spirits,
attempting to contain it through language.
Through the social algorithm we call faith,
that awe, once reinforced, invites beauty in its relative sense.

At the threshold of human perception—
the limit of the light we can receive—
the heart acknowledges the beauty of white.

White as White.
Beauty, or perhaps, an Iron Maiden.

This work poses questions about whiteness and beauty.
A baby figurine sits beneath an IV drip filled with white paint, falling drop by drop.

Viewers can choose to make the figurine even whiter using a paintbrush in their left hand or wipe away the white paint with a tissue in their right, and then carry out that choice.

This baby figurine once resided in the cradle immediately to the right upon entering the Escape Bar. Some visitors may have grown fond of it over time.

This piece reflects the relativity of beauty within the Escape Bar.
Many who step inside comment on how “clean” or “beautiful” it looks—impressions likely linked to the color white’s associations with purity, holiness, and cleanliness.

Originally, the bar was a brown-toned café purchased as-is. Over the course of three months, it was steadily transformed by layering on white paint.
Each time a person enters, the white floor becomes marked with dark footprints. Rather than cleaning, we simply repaint over those marks with more white paint.

We label the dark (black) as “dirty” and keep burying it under the “clean” white paint.
Yet again, people come in and say, “It’s so clean.”

In many ways, “justice” belongs to the victor. Throughout history, the winners of wars have overwritten the stories that came before.
In this space, what was deemed dirty—dark traces of nature—gets repeatedly covered with a white, chemical-based coating, creating layers of beauty, a kind of geological strata of paint.
By substituting a baby—this symbol of innocence—for the floor of the bar, which has been made “purely white” by countless coats of paint, the work challenges viewers to examine their own conceptions of “beauty.”

Click here for information on Run Away Bars https://camp-fire.jp/projects/733080/view