Being Given

The Japanese translation of grace is Omoiyari or Oncho. I know the world this way, using these words, learning the world through them, and finding the world between grace and Oncho: the space that Rei Naito expresses in her installation Oncho, the space beyond words.

Art may also be another language or set of symbols. However, we all have picture book experiences where we have memorized all the pictures, feelings and experiences in the book before the words, and repeatedly read the book and understood every unwritten detail, just like breathing. Still undifferentiated by language, all these precise unnamed spaces were clearly formed and alive. 

Rei Naito’s works remind me of the language of undifferentiated space. The unnamed space before language is very familiar to me; nonverbal, figureless, shapeless, colorless, unseen, unnamed and a slight but certain happiness is in this nameless space.

The nameless space that was represented by the name of being given, not grace: given by someone, something, others. Refilled with the happiness that was given to each individual alone, all alone in this city of ten million inhabitants. The distant sight line was equally given to everything and everybody. With this newly given to me, awed and fulfilled, I reopened the door to the world, into the gray sky; looking back again and again, leaving the nameless space behind. 

I certainly know this place very well.

Being given
Nadiff, Tokyo
6/6-7/7 2002