I have painted portraits for a long time. A portrait does not appear only through the likeness of a person, but also through the landscapes or objects that lie between that person and myself. The distinction between figure, still life, and landscape may be meaningless. In the end, everything points to the portrait of some kind of being. When I look at the space left behind after guests have come and gone; when, among the miscellaneous objects of a flea market, I suddenly encounter traces of someone’s life; when I come face to face with a figure in an old photograph; when objects, removed from their owner’s hands and placed behind glass in a museum, feel like someone’s relics—I strongly sense both the presence and the absence of someone. When I hold onto, on the canvas, the emotional impulse created by this presence and absence, and the intimacy that grows in proportion to the emptiness arising from distance to the subject, it finally becomes a portrait of someone. Painting is an act of drawing up these portraits of presence and absence through memory and sensation. It is a way of reclaiming the uniqueness of anonymous objects that drift around us, and of recovering the non-everyday quality hidden within them.