Interviews with Noriko Kinouchi

On a cruise ship, the usual frameworks for managing and protecting art simply don't apply. The vessel moves, jurisdiction is unclear, and a work can easily be reproduced or displaced outside any formal agreement.Assigning each work a permanent identity on the blockchain was a way of addressing that gap — giving the work an existence that doesn't depend on where it physically is. That said, I don't think of blockchain primarily as a tool for permanence. That connects to what I said about impermanence elsewhere.

The challenge on a ship is that nothing is fixed. The context shifts, the audience changes, the work travels. For hybrid works — where physical materials and digital imagery coexist — a blockchain-based identity offers something that contracts and documentation alone cannot: a record that stays with the work regardless of where it goes.I think this could serve as a practical starting point for other artists working in similarly transient environments.

There is a Buddhist idea: setsuna soku eien — infinity within a single moment. And there is mujo, the understanding that everything is always changing, and that eternity is simply that change, continuous.With that as a foundation, blockchain doesn't feel like a contradiction to me at all. It's not recording something permanent. It's recording that a moment existed. The cherry blossom fell. The water moved. That it was beautiful, in that instant, is true — and that's what gets marked. To me, that's very Japanese, actually.

I wasn't trying to make a screen that displays images. I was trying to make something you could almost feel.I don't plan the movement of the video in advance — I don't say "this part should move like this." The way I think about it is that the time is already inside the work, and my job is to make it visible. When that happens, the work's time and the room's time — the quiet of the restaurant, the pace of people eating and talking — start to mix naturally. And when they mix, the image stops being a screen on a wall. It just exists there.

The moment I saw the ink on the washi paper, and the way the fibers caught the light — that was when something shifted.The precision of the digital print meeting the slight irregularity of handmade paper produced something I hadn't fully anticipated. It felt alive in a way I couldn't have controlled. I've learned over the years that materials with physical presence absorb time — they accumulate it and give depth to a work. That's why I keep coming back to materials like washi. The intuition held.

What I try to pass on to students is this: stop thinking in terms of digital versus analog.Making Kaei Ryusui reminded me that the medium is not the point. What matters is how you tend the aesthetic sensibility inside yourself — how you bring it out into form. The blockchain question is part of that too. It's not just a technical decision. It's the artist asking: how does this work exist in the world after I've finished making it? That's a creative question, and I want students to feel it as one.

What I wanted to make was a work that could only exist in this particular place.The people in that dining room are not standing still in front of a painting. They're eating, talking, looking out at the ocean, coming back. The work has to be able to live alongside all of that without pushing. It has to breathe with the room. I think that's actually one of the most interesting problems for art in public and commercial spaces right now — and one that doesn't get asked often enough.

The washi prints are the stillness around the moving image.When the video flows and shifts, the prints hold the space steady. They create a kind of interval — ma — that the moving image alone couldn't produce. And there's something else: on a ship, natural light moves across the washi surface in ways I can't fully predict. That quality, the way the paper receives light, is something digital simply cannot do. The two exist together not because they complement each other, but because they are genuinely different

People on a ship have chosen to slow down. That's why they're there.I personally love living inside mujo — the feeling that each moment, always shifting, always passing, can feel like forever. A ship in the middle of the ocean felt like the right place for that.And there's something else that only works on a ship: when the voyage ends, it's over. The passengers will never stand in that light, in that room, at that moment again. That finality quietly echoes what the work is actually about.