Tochigi, b. 1992

Midori Arai, born in Ibaraki, Japan in 1992, graduated from Tokyo Zokei University in 2015 with a bachelor's degree in fine arts. She completed a master's degree in oil painting at Kyoto University of The Arts in 2022. Midori Arai's painting embodies the concept of capturing unconscious movements and reinterpreting them, illustrating the juxtaposition between the body’s finiteness and the painting’s infinity. The strokes serve as both an action and a trace, echoing the ideas presented in Roland Barthes’s essay on Cy Twombly, emphasizing the raw guidance of the hand and its desires over the precise control of the eye. This artwork transcends traditional visual perception, favoring the memory and automatic functions of the body—breathing, blinking, and heartbeat—over conscious intention. It invites the viewer to engage with the physicality of the artistic process and confront the traces of time, reflecting on the inherent limitations and continuous existence of the human form.