Torso 16 – Art Poster (2026)

Torso is a series of paintings that take their idea from the torsos of classical sculpture, bodies without arms or legs. Drawing on the transformation scenes of 1990s Japanese magical-girl manga, it captures the instant when pink blood and starlight burst from a limbless body. When I first learned art, I studied proportion and form through the Venus de Milo. In one of those classes I heard that scholars had tried restoring her lost arms in many ways, only to conclude that she was better without them, and those words have stayed with me ever since. Rather than undoing the damage, to accept the form that remains and find a new way of seeing within it—that, I thought, was a contemporary gaze. Mamoru Oshii's animated feature Ghost in the Shell (1995) begins with a body being made. In the final battle, the protagonist's arms are torn off as she forces open the hatch of a tank, and the film shows the moment a new being is born as her body breaks apart. As a child I found the image somewhat shocking, but when I watched it again years later I saw both the limits of the body and the will to go beyond them, and the staging struck me as sublime. An ancient sculpture that has lost its limbs; a magical girl's transformation; a combining robot from mecha anime breaking apart into pieces and becoming one again. These images come from different eras and cultures, yet they are alike in that each is a moment of passing from an incomplete state to the next stage. All of them are points where things are destroyed, collide, and come into being again. The series began with Torso (2011, digital print, 116 × 92 cm), a digital drawing whose idea came from the final battle scene of Ghost in the Shell. I was thinking of things gushing out without end, of the split second in which they explode and turn into light, and the picture stayed close to the feel of the original film. When I moved to oil on canvas, I turned to the transformation scenes of magical-girl series such as Sailor Moon. I set out to paint dynamic images in a range of expressions and poses, hair streaming through glittering stars and swirling space. I showed these works in my first solo exhibition, NU-TYPE (Makeshop Art Space, Paju, 2014), and I am still continuing the series. I complete the preliminary drawing on the computer and then develop it further on the canvas. The body is rendered in anime-style cel shading, and even in the shadows I try to use colors as vivid as possible. For the feeling of standing before a painting, unlike looking at a manga page or an animation screen, I paint the figures larger than life whenever I can. The main works are oil on canvas, 162 × 130 cm. Most of the figures are nudes of young women. The idealized bodies of classical sculpture and the bishōjo, the idealized young female characters of manga, are both archetypes of beauty that have carried across the ages. I borrow those archetypes and place them in a single instant of transformation: the very moment when light and drops of blood burst forth and something is born. From a torso with a face, pink blood gushes out and, together with many kinds of starlight, opens up a new space. Blood, the source of life and a symbol of death, turns into glittering, jelly-like droplets that fill the picture. I thought of pink as a color that shows death and life at once. In manga and anime it is also the color of the cute and lovable, what is known as moe. The background is made of weightless liquid and swirling animation effects. In this space, not only the figure but everything around it is alive and writhing. The first Torso, following the scene in the film, showed a body twisting with its eyes closed, pain and ecstasy not set apart. Painted again on canvas, the torso passed through the imagination of manga and took on a bright expression. A body without limbs may be one whose limbs have been cut away, or one whose limbs have not yet come into being. All that remains is the moment when something is released from within. Just as an ancient sculpture in its incomplete state can be accepted as an already complete form, I carry the bold expressions of manga and animation, made possible precisely because they belonged to subculture, into the language of painting. My aim is less to bring classical forms into the present than to let the images that have built up inside me collide within painting, and to find the points where new meaning comes into being.