Hoshi ni Negaiwo: Kifu no Michi (Wish Upon a Star: Way of the Seasonal Wind)
So beautiful it sends a chill down your spine.
Though stillness and movement were at first in opposition, now the one world is in complete harmony.
The unconventional work, which transcends the four seasons, heaven and earth, left and right, permutations and rules, standards and ways of looking at things, and conventions of form, is a work of art that uniquely suits me.
The more you do karakami, the more you are confronted with spirituality.
It is not mere paper. It is paper imbued with the gods.。
I have been aiming to produce a karakami world with presence. You could call it an incomplete beauty. I believe it will be completed by the light in the hearts of the people who come to see it amidst shadows and fluctuations.
It isn’t there, and yet it is.
Every day I think about how I want to touch something that is beyond technology and artifice.
At times, to grasp that power, I am in a continual battle with myself, and I pray daily as I throw my body and soul at karakami.
In that way, the karakami born of my prayers for world peace and the tranquility and happiness of people’s hearts is the essence of this blue and white world.
Karakami Artist Toto Akihiko
On side A, the cosmos that overflows from the Toto Blue spring, “Hoshi ni Negaiwo (Wish Upon a Star).”
On side B, chaos that becomes silence, the swirling vortex of the white trees, “Kifu no Michi (Way of the Seasonal Wind).”