Spatial art installation for the Inaugural Art Venture Ehime FES 2025. Ehime Prefecture and Tokyo University of the Arts teamed up to implement the “art venture ehime.” This initiative aims to deepen connections between people and communities through art, generate new value and relationships, and “create Ehime's future.” This was one of 24 projects selected from over 300 proposals.
This is an homage to Kenzo Tange, who spent the formidable years growing up in Imabari City, Ehime, who would go on to become a visionary that created architecture and cities while always looking to the future, yet fully aware of his place in the great flow of history. His works are not isolated fragments removed from humanity's ever-unfolding epic. Rather, guided by a deep understanding of both local and global history and traditions, Tange accumulated countless precedents in his memory-revealing the hidden relationships that trace an arc from the classics to the present. Through these precedents, I seek to experimentally embody the architectural thought processes at the core of his practice, exploring the latent overture he rendered visible within those sweeping trajectories.

Tange's Mindscape in His Hometown of Imabari
Tange leaves a deep imprint on Imabari, Ehime Prefecture, where he spent his boyhood. Having moved from Shanghai to Imabari as an elementary school student and spending his formative years here until graduating high school, this place can be said to be his “primordial landscape” that subconsciously influenced the roots of Tange's creativity. Imabari preserved its Civic Hall, one of his postwar modernist architectural masterpieces. This spatial art installation traces his ideas and forms, using this historic building as its stage. Entitled “Ode to Tange: Epigenetic Merveilles of Kenzo”, this echoes Tange’s doctoral dissertation “Ode to Michelangelo: Prologue to Theories on Le Corbusier.”
At the center of the space, a massive organdy fabric gently undulates. This surface serves as a boundary, separating the suspended kawara ceramic objects from the grounded stone objects.

Epigenetic Landscape
In this work, the organdy fabric is not merely a spatial divider. It represents Tange's inspirational process, and the “undulations of the brain” at the threshold of where concepts and memories crystallizes into architecture. Spheres representing the process of navigating a path of least resistance, are placed on the fabric's undulating surface, which visitors can freely move.
This draws on the theory from genetics of the “Epigenetic Landscape.” This concept likens the process of differentiation from a fertilized egg into various cells to a topographical map, suggesting how individual organisms manifest into unique traits and characteristics through the complex interplay of genetic and environmental factors.

Spatial Composition
Tange's Civic Hall served as the stage for this work. Since we could not drill holes into this historic building and its reinforced concrete ceiling, we had no choice but to install a temporary ceiling. We secured the framework to the beams with clamps and constructed the surface using lightweight panel materials. Ideally, we wanted to use mirrored panels. The kawara ceramic objects were arranged in a 4x4 grid and fixed to the ceiling framework. The challenge lay in positioning the holes in the organdy fabric and the stone objects. To translate a diagrammatically sorted relationship into a three-dimensional space, we ran an optimization program to ascertain placements of stone objects and holes, based on three simple rules: 1) Stone objects must be at least 1 meter apart; 2) Rubber cords must not entangle; and 3) Rubber cords connecting ceramics-fabric-stones must be the shortest possible. After over 60,000 permutations, we finally found the optimal arrangement.
This project required: handcraft and technology; abstract and concrete; individual and aggregate; static and dynamic. We aimed for a multifaceted, multilayered spatial experience that constantly encompassed various dichotomies and all existences in between, rather than leaning toward any single extreme.