Hitotzuki

Photos courtesy of Hitotzuki

Kami & Sasu are not your typical domestic husband and wife; not only are they a world-renowned art team known as Hitotzuki (Sun and Moon), having shown in Asia, Europe and the States, they’re essentially world citizens who travel for the sake of generating art.

With murals, installations, and live art performances influenced by Japanese calligraphy, nature, and flying around the world, the elusive pair leave an impression like a contrail: here one moment, gone the next. Theme got them to explain how their traveling life ties into their art and vice versa.

Theme: What does “travel” mean for Kami/Sasu/Hitotzuki?
Kami: For me, “travel” means journey, adventure, work...all those meanings in one. We basically have the same definition for it, but it’s mostly about leaving behind the everyday, the normal, and coming into contact with atmospheres we’re not used to. It’s also about seeing our own life and living environment as if we were tourists, and it can be what inspires new work of us. Based on the fun times and the hard times we had traveling, we will raise the ante for ourselves and increase confidence in what we do.

Sasu: When I travel I realize what really matters, so I shed unnecessary feelings, and learn new sensations that I need. Traveling sort of resets me. It’s frequently difficult to see our lives from the outside, like tourists. In my case, [feelings can] materialize in color, like when I taste new foods or flavors, my color sense changes magically. I think about how what I just experienced will appear in my next work, because the good things and the bad things will all affect me, and I have been able to enjoy traveling because I have this mode of expression called painting, by which I express boredom and excitement.

I like vacations in nature, the great outdoors. Without a care in the world, just passing time slowly, making my mind empty. That’s really important to have sometimes. It’s also significant when Kami goes on road trips with his skater friends or we travel individually.

Google Earth view of Yoyogi Park street painting, Bottom: Detail of street painting

Travel means returning at some point. Where do you return to?
Kami: We come back to Tokyo, where we currently live. Traveling is enjoyable precisely because there is a home (a hometown, a house, your friends, etc.). Sometimes it’s because your roots are so firmly entrenched at “home” that you can enjoy a moment in each new place so simply and so easily. I really value being able to notice the difference in atmosphere, language, scenery, people’s feelings, cuisines, and ways of thinking, between where I am from and the countries I visit. It broadens my horizons, and before I know it my limited perspective is momentarily shattered, and I experience new feelings. I get to take those new feelings back with me so frequently that coming home is like the beginning of another trip. We only gradually come back to our lifestyles.

Sasu: Say we are in Tokyo, our perspective is still consciously curious. Sometimes I’ll even go out pretending I’m from a foreign country. I will see old things in new ways and there’s a lot of fun in making new discoveries.

Kami: Right now I have friends I consider to be like family, in every country, so home is Tokyo, but there are so many places that feel like home because of those friends.

The place that holds the strongest impression on both of us is a little island in Indonesia which, sorry, we will leave unnamed. There are no cars or motorbikes there, just horse-drawn carriages and bicycles. Life there is really simple, nature and man are both wild, and the “as is” way of that place was very powerful.

To be inspired by travel—to you, does this mean the places you’ve been to were inspirational, or that the act of traveling is a motif in your work?
Kami: The reason travel might be particularly inspirational for us is that as Hitotzuki, the theme of our creative endeavor is the lifestyle we have traveled. So, traveling is an integral part of our work, and we couldn’t stop traveling even if we wanted to, because our work is the result of traveling to all kinds of countries and places. So yeah, travel is a big inspiration in our work, be it in foreign countries or domestically, be it leisure or work. The influences we acquire while traveling are sometimes concrete (new scenic colors, tastes, architecture, people), but the biggest influence is psychological, and the fact that we’re accumulating experiences.

Sasu: You could say our work utilizes the sensations we’ve experienced, to make one new scene. Instead of showing pictures and telling stories about our travels, we feel like it’s actually a lot more natural to create a visible manifestation of our experiences with our own hands. Based on our interactions with people and friends from foreign countries, we will gain lots of inspiration, bring those feelings back to Japan, and use them in our own lives, giving it new life in our creative work at home. Conversely, we will also take our experiences from Japan abroad.

Kami: We’ve had success with this, but we’ve failed with this concept too. We’ve learned a lot from our mistakes, and that’s all part of having experience, which is what we’re built on.

X-Color, 2005

Have you ever traveled someplace and just felt bored?
Kami: I feel like no matter where I am, I can have fun. For example, the first time we went on our Barnstormers tour we were in Cameron, North Carolina, a tiny town in the middle of nowhere, but whether we had fun or whether it was boring as hell, it was just where we were. It’s not like there’s fun times waiting for you wherever you go in life, but it’s that you are changing things up, figuring out a way to have enjoy yourself no matter what. I think that goes for life in general though, and not just traveling.

Sasu: Even if you try to enjoy yourself, sometimes you will feel like this place just isn’t for you, but conversely, I feel like I know what kind of place will fit me better, knowing what kind of place feels good for you, or is good for traveling, and for life in general, I think.

What was the original intent of the Barnstormers? Was it to bring something urban into a rural area, for example?
Kami: We weren’t thinking about applying any urban sensibility to rural America or anything. I think the Barnstormers project expressed something much purer in a very pioneering kind of way. We’d get up in the morning and paint all day into the night, and there we were, nature, the wall, me. I remember there was nothing besides the artists, the people of Cameron, and us, and there was no need to think about anything else at all. I felt like that was very close to what a simple person’s life must be like, and time passed very differently, ideally, than it would in the city. That first trip was essentially the beginning of our work together.

Sasu: To see our work suddenly appear after a whole day on that tobacco barn in that corner of Cameron, was uncanny, magical, if I do say so myself. Our only purpose was the act of painting. As the sun started to set behind our backs in the evening, we thought we should start calling it a day soon. It was my first time on tour, and I was scared of climbing up to the top at first. Painting so high on the barn was a real challenge. Painting became a way to communicate with the new friends and locals we met in different countries.

What was the most inspirational or enjoyable place you’ve been to?
Sasu: The place that holds the strongest impression on both of us is a little island in Indonesia which, sorry, we will leave unnamed. There are no cars or motorbikes there, just horse-drawn carriages and bicycles. Life there is really simple, nature and man are both wild, and the “as is” way of that place was very powerful. Tokyo is a really convenient place to live because there’s so much stuff, people, information, happenings just overflowing. But that’s what made the island that much more interesting. There was absolutely nothing complicated, and the obvious was that much more direct. So to come back to Tokyo, to Japan, and re-discover its charm, makes trips like that really ideal.