what we told ourselves

Keita Morimoto moved to Canada when he was 16 years old, and returned to Japan after turning 30, in 2021—during the COVID-19 pandemic. Since his return, his principal motifs have been the nocturnal city and the young people who gather there. His paintings all draw from photographs of scenes from the night, dawn, and twilight that he has personally accumulated through fieldwork. At times, he depicts scenes from the city as they are, while at other times, he aggregates elements from several different locations to create a single space. Within these settings, he selects models from among photographs he has taken of close friends, and places them within his compositions, bringing real landscapes and people together like a cut-and-paste collage. The artificial lights in the city illuminate the young people who spend their nights as they please, while phone booths, now dwindling in number, and vending machines emit a glow in the dark and appear to float within the darkness. The human figures and machines are zoned in on as entities that both seem to hold a certain energy within the night.      

Morimoto’s paintings, with their realistic depictions and seemingly perfect compositions, may seem impeccable—and yet, they evoke a lingering eeriness. The seemingly perfect, yet somehow unnatural paintings he renders have continued to occupy my mind. I believe this is precisely why his work is so appealing.  

Morimoto has said that he seeks to create a source of unease in his works—portraying people who could potentially be there, but are not in reality. He has also spoken about always feeling a dissonance between himself and the places he occupies, and how this lies at the root of his perspective and artistic practice. For Morimoto, who moved to a place with a different language and culture at the formative age of 16, a sense of discordance and misalignment must have been constant, and after spending many years away from Japan, he must have inevitably felt a degree of disjunction in his everyday life upon returning to Japanese society. This personal experience of difference undoubtedly influences his work, more fundamentally, the artist’s own disposition—that he by no means pursues stability—also seems to significantly inform his creations.  

Morimoto decided to leave Japan when entering high school because he felt fear and hopelessness in the predictable future of going to high school, then university, and eventually employment in the same country. When he closed the 15-year chapter of his life in Canada, he says that it was because his future there had also begun to feel predictable. Humans usually seek stability and comfort, but there is nothing usual about Morimoto. His works are driven by an exploration of and curiosity toward a world beyond the scope of his own imagination: a self as yet unknown, a future as yet unimagined, a world as yet unseen.   

The sense of dissonance, of something being slightly off about his surroundings, led to Morimoto’s discovery of the concept of “heterotopia,” proposed by Michel Foucault—a significant theme within the artist’s work. Heterotopias describe specific spaces that exist in reality but function as counter-sites within dominant social norms. Foucault provides several specific spaces as examples, among which his discussions of the mirror and the boat are particularly fascinating when considering Morimoto’s work. 

With a mirror, everything it reflects is unreal. This illusory image enables the viewer to grasp themselves and their surrounding world within a place where they are, properly speaking, absent. It is an unreal space, or utopia, and at the same time an “other” space, or heterotopia. Mirrors not only exist in reality but also act upon the real world through the virtual space beyond them. The “I” who sees them grasps their own position and the surrounding space, thereby reconstituting themselves. Morimoto’s paintings, too—like mirrors—make the viewer aware of that fictional self, the self that might have been.  

Moreover, at the end of Foucault’s text on heterotopias, he states that, a boat is “the greatest reserve of the imagination,” describing it as a “…the greatest reserve of the imagination” and “a floating morsel of space, a placeless place—that lives by itself, that is closed in on itself and is at the same time delivered to the infinity of the sea and [goes] from port to port, from run to run… in search of that which is most precious…（1984）.*1” Morimoto, as if floating in a vast sea, drifts within the city, depicting places that have no place, the unseen, and the moments that pass by unnoticed, creating alternate realities by deliberately failing to fully grasp the world. Like a boat, Morimoto’s paintings become a reserve of imagination.  

The peculiar sense of dissonance I have felt upon encountering Morimoto’s paintings stems from the deliberate gaps and margins that he consciously creates. These simultaneously prompt an experience of sympathy or exchange between the viewer and the work. The meticulous rendering of landscapes, the realistic depiction of figures, the dramatic play of light—though the scenes appear as if based on specific stories or events, his paintings contain nothing of the sort. Morimoto’s works do not seek to convey anything in particular; rather, they exert an influence on the viewer, prompting the subject—the “I”—to project themselves onto the painting. And so, we begin to imagine the story of an “other” self. 

*1  Michel Foucault, “Des espaces autres,” Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité 5 (1984): 46–49; English translation by Ben Cagan (unpublished). 

Yumiko Nonaka（Senior Curator, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa） 

This exhibition, ‘what we told ourselves‘, features large-scale paintings alongside Morimoto’s first venture into installation art. The exhibition space extends his work into the real world, aiming to offer a more immersive experience of the sensation he portrays: that of having deliberately failed to fully grasp the world. As viewers engage with the work, they may get the sense that something is escaping them. This experience also exposes the stories and fictions we construct and in which we believe as a way of filling the gaps of what we’ve overlooked—“what we told ourselves.”