In an interview back then, you said that your daily routine is to “make one piece in the morning, and one in the afternoon”. Have you kept up this routine since that exhibition?No, I haven’t
This is backtracking a little, but did those initial monochrome paintings you showed at your first solo show in New York arise from a particular idea?So when I was wondering what to do before the show, I just happened to have been playing around with some white and black gouache paint and ended up with this crazy beautiful gradation. Even I thought it was really cool, so I started looking for a way to turn it into something. That’s how it all started. It felt so great making these smooth gradations of black turning into white, so it was that, like just that pleasure alone kicked everything off. From there I got sucked into the world of white and black.
You did stick with monochrome for quite a while after that, huh.Yep, I was in that zone for a long time, and then I got sick of working in black and white and dropped it like a bad habit
Then you suddenly jumped back into color artwork with your exhibition “Game Over” at Massimo De Carlo in Milan in 2020...Yeah. Without telling anyone.
Did suddenly changing course like that make you nervous at all?Oh yeah, it most definitely did. After all, it was in a way like tossing out my highly-esteemed career in black and white. Sticking with monochrome most likely would’ve been the safer course. There was a me who was like, “Then just do both” and then a me who said, “No way, don’t be so weak.” So it was a huge decision to make, one that really had me unsure of what to do. But I was tired of monochrome and told myself that if I don’t like it, then I don’t like it. So at that point it was like, “Let’s just go for it!”
Another thing was that expressionless worldview had suddenly started to seem lame to me. There’d been a huge flood of faceless artwork similar to mine out there in the world, and I was getting friends from all over thinking it was funny and sending me images on Instagram and the like saying, “Hey Tomo, I found a copycat of yours!” I laughed too at first since I was partly flattered to have people imitating my work, but over time I began to see pieces that looked so close to mine that even I couldn’t tell them apart at first glance. Partly because of that, I began to think “Man, this is lame” when I saw my own work.
On top of that, I’d been thinking for a while that I’d fallen into a predictable pattern, so it was about time I tried something different. Pre-established harmony, as they call it. Once you end up there, things turn into a snoozefest. I’m the first audience for my artwork, and I need to be surprised, of course. But all the surprise had run out, so now I had to flip the script.
When did you honestly start feeling that way?I’d been feeling that way for quite some time, to be honest. I did a fairly large show at a gallery in LA around 15 years ago where I made some pieces in blue and white instead of black and white. My “blue era”, if you will.