Equinox 2024

Before humans had the ability to decompose the world, they had no idea of ​​observing objects at high resolution. Instead, they believed that everything in the universe had its origin. To put it simply, it was the story that lies behind our everyday lives.

Languages ​​around the world each have their own unique names for the same phenomena and things in the world.

Weather phenomena such as rain and wind are found everywhere and have a major impact on our lives, so it makes sense that they have their own names, and as expected, words for rain and wind exist in languages ​​all over the world.

For example, there is the expression “under the table.” In modern terms, this could be replaced with the word “bribery.” Words with roughly the same meaning exist all over the world, and interestingly, each country has its own slang equivalent. These behind-the-scenes exchanges that don’t appear on the books have likely supported human social life, for better or worse, across different places and eras.

Our ancestors realized that by separating and creating words for things other than human interactions, such as individual plants and animals, weather phenomena, and bodily matters like health and illness, social life would run more smoothly. For example, there is the word “vernal equinox.” And there are also words all over the world that mean the same phenomenon.

The vernal equinox itself is a manifestation of an astronomical phenomenon, and is the movement of the Earth itself. Although this knowledge is gained from observing the movements of celestial bodies, the fact that people all over the world noticed the phenomenon is evidence that the impact of changes in sunlight on daily life has always been a major concern for humans everywhere. There is another phenomenon on Earth each year that is similar to the vernal equinox: the autumnal equinox.

One represents the turning point of the reversal phenomenon from long night to long day, and the other represents the opposite. Our ancestors, who observed celestial phenomena with the naked eye, did not need to observe extremely resolution, discovered that this celestial phenomenon repeated periodically and intuitively knew that something significant was happening. They must have used the days when the length of day and night reversed as a guide for their cultivation schedules. What story is hidden behind this phenomenon? Each society must have had its own story.

Stories that people could believe in and were worthy of belief were “discovered” using their insight and imagination. Whether geocentric or heliocentric, the movement of celestial bodies reminds us of circulation, or the great flow of going and returning, and repetition – in other words, eternity.

This work is my own story of the causality that I imagine lies hidden behind the world. The eternally circulating sky, the land that seems to go on forever if you walk on it, the vast ocean that continues beyond that, and the reality that the sun who illuminates everything has decided to rise and fall repeatedly, I imagine the stories behind and I reach out to them.