2025 Finalists

Memory performs two essential roles in our lives – it constructs our sense of identity and enables the processes of reflection and learning.

“Nova Hata” (new room) is a part of the project “When It Is Our Turn to Be Adults” which examines the intricate tension between a child’s idealised vision of adulthood and the complex, often disenchanted reality that adulthood ultimately reveals. It explores the inevitable encounter with loss, disappointment, and the fragility of meaning – experiences that challenge inherited narratives of maturity. Within this confrontation emerges the possibility of reassembling the self, not in spite of these ruptures, but through them – as a response to the shifting emotional and existential landscapes that define the transition into adulthood.

The foundation of this work lies in personal archival photographs, which I reinterpret through painting. At the core of my inquiry is the fragmentary nature of memory – particularly the phenomenon of vividly recalling details of clothing while the broader narrative of events remains blurred or partially lost. In this context, clothing emerges as a key marker of both bodily and emotional memory.

Unfinished objects, a faded colour palette, and vanishing textures evoke the quality of recollection. The use of pink – a colour often associated with naivety – introduces a sense of anxious ambiguity, like a premonition of impending change.

This work does not depict a singular moment of coming of age, but rather traces it as an unfolding process. Adulthood here is not merely a life stage, but a space of loss, reinterpretation, and the search for a renewed identity. Within this project, art becomes a means of reassembling the self – through the material remnants of the past, through images and emotions that surface at the threshold between memory and present experience.

(22/25)