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In The Book of Tea
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| Tenshin Okakura makes an interesting observation about teahouses（sukiya）in The Book of Tea. He finds three significant things about the
teahouse. First，he calls it a“Adobe of Fancy,”based on the original
Chinese characters used to write the word sukiya. Second，he calls it a“Adobe of Vacancy”because there nothing in it except those things
that are absolutely necessary. Last, he calls it a“Adobe of the Unsymmetrical” due to the deliberately incomplete way it is built.
These three ideas regarding the teahouses have much in common
with my ideas about creating art. First of all，almost everything I
produce makes use of materials that are“readymade”products. As a
result，besides its function，my selection of an object is based largely
on whether it appeals to my personal taste. Then, in placing the thing
that I have made in a space，rather than the way the work is positioned，the important thing is how“empty”a space I can create
according to the way I position the work in it. In work involving sound
as a material, it is important that the medium that conveys the sound
from the source to the viewer fill the space and be invisible and
transparent like ether. And，because I simply set the object in a space，
my works are distinguished by their unfinished nature. I use the
smallest devices possible and don't go out of my way to prepare the
space in any special way. By encouraging the viewer to use their
imagination，the work becomes complete.
In the process of creating work based on these ideas， I came to be
aware of a delicate boundary. First，even when a space is not
surrounded by something，by merely putting down a small stone or
drawing a line，a space suddenly emerges. These objects become a
boundary and the space beckons you into it. On the other hand，when
it comes to experience，things that you experience through your
sensory organs have the characteristic of spreading outward from your
body（the center）like ripples to the surrounding area. A space exists
and experiencing something within it is a situation in which a
“beckoning thing”and a“spreading thing”collide. My interest is in
how easily and with how much tension these encounters with
boundaries can be created.
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PP.120-121, Yukio Fujimoto “by f about f”
for the exhibition of Audio Picnic at the Museum 6/10
at Otani Memorial Art Museum, Nishinomiya City in 2002
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