https://hanatsubaki.shiseido.com/jp/column2/25159/

Translation of article in English

Nomura has attempted to expose life and death, and what lies between them, through a variety of mediums based on photography and sculpture. He was motivated to start his creative work by two 'deaths' he experienced in his teens. One was the loss of a disabled family member.
'I couldn't accept her death for a long time, and I was in a dangerous situation where I wanted to be close to death myself, but the only thing that helped me, partly because my parents ran a painting class, was to make things with my hands, read books and listen to music. Above all, I am grateful for the environment in which art was an expression."

Eventually, Nomura went on to study at Musashino Art University, but he never spoke to those around him about his personal motives for creation and kept his self-consciousness closed. Meanwhile, in the London art scene of the 1990s and early 2000s, a young generation of artists known as 'Young British Artists' (YBA) were in the limelight. Nomura found a sense of closeness to himself in the smell of 'death' that pervaded their world of work, and in their destructive yet poetic expression, and in 2009 he decided to study at Goldsmiths, University of London.
'It was the time when my inner and outer worlds were finally coming together for the first time. At the university, I was taught by invited YBA artists such as Rachel Whiteread and Martin Creed, who thoroughly trained me in everything from motifs to choice of medium. I tried to express my inner self by daring to use fragile materials such as beeswax, acrylic resin and lard, but I also experienced incidents where my work broke apart during exhibitions. When I was losing the will to create, a friend gave me a Polaroid camera out of concern. My approach to expression changed when I realised that by recording my work in photographs, I could hold on to the proof of the existence of the broken pieces.

One of the two photographic works in the exhibition is Biophotons Shine, a work that extracts light from vintage portraits taken over a period of more than 100 years by burning vintage portraits taken between 1903 and 2023. The work consists of a collection of portraits taken around the world between 1903 and 2023 (including the artist's family/ancestors), which were photographed in a darkroom with a long exposure of a burning flame. Biophoton is a biological term combining the words bio (meaning life) and photon (meaning light), and refers to the minute amounts of bioluminescent light emitted from the human body, like fireflies.
'When I look at a photograph of my grandfather, born 100 years ago, and a photograph of an enemy American soldier who fought at the same time, I wonder at the undeniable fact that both men lived, that anonymous history existed at the same time. If a soul exists, it must remain somewhere in the afterlife, and it is rather cruel that old photographs are left behind (for posterity). Then I thought that by burning the photographs, they could be unleashed and set free. The subject of my creation is that even if the medium is broken, its essence remains intact and the fact of its existence does not disappear."

Another experience of death for the Kobe native was the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake of 1995, when he was a junior high school student. Later, in 2011, he volunteered there after the Great East Japan Earthquake. At the time, the activities of photographers in the affected areas who were restoring snapshots and portraits that had been scattered and damaged by the tsunami also attracted attention.
Nomura's experience of the disaster led him to develop Fantôme, a work that uses a photographic device that prints photographs on water to make portraits of people who have died appear in a film of water. He has collaborated with companies on the technical side of the project.When he moved to New York in 2019, friends of the artist provided him with 10 portraits of his immediate family and this work was exhibited in a gallery in Manhattan. The work was highly acclaimed and resonated with the citizens of New York, many of whom lost their lives in the Corona disaster.
For this exhibition, members of the public provided photos of their loved friends and family members lost in the past via the internet, and the photo data collected in the cloud will be printed on water at the venue. The ink that prints the photos floats in the water and dissolves over time.

Like Nomura, many people may have experienced 'death', 'destruction' and 'annihilation' as if they were annihilating people and things during their impressionable years, and have searched for the meaning of life. Especially nowadays, when digitalised information is like a muddy stream that washes over time, everyone, not just artists, must be keenly aware of the transience of material existence and the nature of human beings.
Nomura's works all have exquisite and complex layers, but at their core lies the belief that the fact of an individual's life will remain somewhere in the world, beautiful and eternal. Many people will be encouraged by this shakingly single-minded passion.

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