Sachiko Abe
Artist Talk
guest room 011
Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art
21-1 Nishi Sayagatani Town, Tobata Ward, Kitakyushu City,
Fukuoka
29th August 2026
First, I would like to tell you briefly about how I became an artist. After graduating from high school, I joined the Japan Self-Defense Forces and served for four years. After that, I worked for a temporary staffing agency.
Around that time, I often went drinking at gallery SOAP in Kokura. The people I met at SOAP were artists, musicians, and others who belonged to a world completely different from the one I knew at the time.
I admired them very much, and I thought: “I want to become an artist too.”
I never attended art school, and I have never received any formal art education.
But in 1998, my work was selected for a competition for the first time, and from there I began working as an artist. In 2003, I received a grant from the ACC and spent a year in New York. It was during that time that I began developing in earnest a performance called Cut Papers.
I have continued making Cut Papers, a work in which I keep cutting paper with scissors, for many years. So why did someone making this kind of work begin creating the drawings you see in this exhibition?
It began with something someone said to me in 2004.
After returning from New York, I went to visit a gallery in Fukuoka, they said: “Sachiko, it seems that you are getting attention for your performance work, but art has to circulate. Performance cannot enter that system of circulation.” I did not really understand what he meant.
“What does it mean for art to circulate?”
“And, in the first place, what is art?”
I began thinking about these questions.
One day, as usual, I was drinking at Gallery SOAP and doodling with a ballpoint pen on a paper napkin. Someone at Gallery SOAP, an artist, looked at it and said: “What are you drawing? That’s creepy.” This was a friend who I had known for a long time, so I felt that
when he said “creepy,” he did not simply mean that it was bad. There was also a sense that something about it had caught his attention. So I thought: “Maybe this could become a work.”
Instead of drawing on paper napkins, I decided to try drawing on
proper paper.
I then gave one of the finished drawings as a birthday present to Laura Bartlett in London, the gallery I was working with at the time. Laura liked it very much and immediately displayed it on the gallery wall. Then someone came along who wanted to buy it.
That was the first time I thought: “Ah, perhaps this is what it means for art to ‘circulate’.” That was in 2005. and that is how Drawing Works began.
However, as I mentioned, I have no formal art education. So at first, I had absolutely no confidence in my drawings. I asked myself: if I have never received an art education, how can I take responsibility for my work?
The answer I arrived at was very simple:
To work every day.
To make work at a fixed time, as though I were going to a job.
That was the discipline I imposed upon myself:
Five hours of Drawing Works.
Five hours of Cut Papers.
Altogether, I continued living a life in which I worked for ten hours every day. The ten-metre work exhibited here took approximately twelve years to complete.
So what am I actually doing when I make these drawings? Incidentally, it takes me around 35 hours to complete a single A4 size drawing, a B4-size drawing, takes around 55 hours.
And when I am drawing, I actually often have videos playing in the and when I am drawing, I actually often have videos playing in the background.
The reason is that if I draw without listening to anything, I start thinking: next here, then here, then here… and before I know it, I am thinking about 130 moves ahead.It becomes incredibly exhausting. So I deliberately watch or listen to videos while I draw, and
incidentally, if the video is interesting, the drawing goes particularly well.
I continued making Drawing Works in this way for many years, but there was one thing that bothered me. From time to time, someone would look at these drawings and still say: “They’re creepy.” When I think about it, the work itself began with the statement
When I think about it, the work itself began with the statement “That’s creepy,” so perhaps there's something strangely appropriate about this. But I began to wonder: “How could I make a drawing that people would not describe as creepy?” That question eventually led to the new work in this exhibition, Velvet Purple.
However, I cannot simply decide, “I am going to make a new work,” and immediately make one. I do not believe that simply because I am an artist, I must constantly produce something new:
“Is a new work really necessary?”
“Is this only a temporary feeling?”
“Am I simply being influenced by someone or something else?”
I asked myself these questions again and again. It took six years before I was convinced.
And when I finally decided to make a new work, I wanted colour to be important. I experimented with many commercially available inks. But I simply could not find the colour I was looking for.
Eventually, I had an original ink specially made, and decided to use that ink in a fountain pen to make the drawings. It took approximately another two and a half years to reach that point. That became Velvet Purple, now I am truly glad that I made this new work.
Looking back, Drawing Works began because someone told me: “Art has to circulate.”
What does circulation mean?
What is art?
The work began from questions as simple as these. More than twenty years have passed since then, but even now, I continue making work while asking myself very
similar questions:
“Is this really necessary?”
“Is this really my work?”
“Why am I making this?”
Sometimes it takes me years to arrive at an answer, but I think that is all right. In this exhibition, you can see those more than twenty years of time through the works themselves. If you look at them and think they're beautiful, that is fine. and if you think they are creepy, that is fine too.
If each of you can simply feel something in your own way, there is nothing that could make me happier as an artist.
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