Year: 2022
Medium: acrylic on canvas
Dimensions: 162 x 130 cm (63 3/4 x 51 1/8 in.)
Acquired from White Stone Gallery, 2022
When one first looks at this work from a distance, it appears as if there is white paint swaying like white smoke or clouds on a pitch-black background. Upon a closer look, viewers will be surprised to see that the painting is filled with words, symbols, and mathematical formulas. Nakamura deliberately incorporates strong ideograms and words into his paintings, an element which others tend to avoid. This is probably due to the fact that the artist had been struggling with innate hearing impairment. It is difficult for people with normal hearing to perceive characters as mere “forms”, without sound. Imagine when an ideographic number is written alone, no matter how people call it “Ichi”, or “One”, or “Hito”, eventually “1” comes to mind. Non-Japanese speakers encounter such difficulty while seeing hiragana for the first time. The only people who can hear “あ” are those who are familiar with the sound “a” in their minds. We can easily imagine that one who can subconsciously finish a task will find it hard to understand the difficulty others come across, and that is not one’s fault. Nakamura visualizes difficulties and overcomes them. This, which is not written as letters or language in the commonly understood sense, is nothing more than a painting.
