SAKURA MARU
Acrylic and oil on linen
116.7 × 80.3 cm

In 1899, the Sakura Maru departed Yokohama carrying the first wave of Japanese migrants to Peru, inaugurating a Pacific crossing that would permanently reshape both cultures. The blue-footed booby is native to the eastern Pacific coast of the Americas, its improbable cobalt feet the most vivid thing in the painting and the first feature to vanish in death. Beside the living bird stands its own skeleton, looking away from a flower that is simultaneously a Japanese lily and a Peruvian hibiscus, resolved into neither, belonging to both shores at once. The tray beneath them holds the chaotic contents of a sea crossing: squid, blood, eyes, the detritus of the deep. A yellow supermarket tag bearing the slogan まいったかこの安さ (“Can’t beat these prices!”) and a ticket stub from a voyage that cannot be undated lie among the wreckage.

Growing up beside the Pacific Ocean, I often found myself wondering what lay on the other side. Years later, painting this work in Yokohama, I realized I had reached one of the places I used to imagine. The ocean no longer felt like an edge between continents, but a shared space where histories, species, and people have crossed paths for centuries.

The painting is a memento mori and a danse macabre, where the living and the dead share the same pedestal without apparent alarm.