Grand Interview
Kaei Ryusui Konschtinstallatioun · 10 Froen
People tend to talk about Kaei Ryusui in terms of technology or cultural reference. But what I actually want people to understand is something more basic: I don't think of this as a "digital work" in any special…
The Kaei Ryusui Art Installation is a remarkable synthesis of Japanese cultural memory and contemporary digital expression, and receiving recognition from one of the world's most prestigious design competitions, the A' Design Award, speaks to the depth and originality of this work. Is there a particular dimension of the Kaei Ryusui Art Installation that you feel has not yet been fully explored in public conversation about it, and that you would most want the design community to understand about the intentions and meaning embedded within this piece?
People tend to talk about Kaei Ryusui in terms of technology or cultural reference. But what I actually want people to understand is something more basic: I don't think of this as a "digital work" in any special sense.When I was a student, I drew with charcoal, painted in oils, pulled woodblock prints. What I do now is not different from that. I take the seed of something beautiful that comes to me, and I give it form with my hands. The tool has changed. The act hasn't.
The Kaei Ryusui Art Installation has drawn considerable attention from those interested in the intersection of fine art and emerging technology, particularly because of its integration of blockchain-based provenance tracking to assign a permanent digital identity to each work. How do you envision this approach to authentication reshaping the way high-value art is managed, verified, and valued within luxury maritime and hospitality environments more broadly, and what does the Kaei Ryusui Art Installation suggest about where the responsibilities of the artist now extend beyond the act of creation itself?
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 Kaei Ryusui Art Installation takes a genuinely pioneering approach by addressing the real and underexamined challenge of securing intellectual property and provenance in complex, mobile environments like ocean-going vessels, where traditional art management frameworks are difficult to apply. In what ways do you believe the framework developed for the Kaei Ryusui Art Installation could serve as a practical model for other artists and institutions seeking to protect and authenticate high-value hybrid art collections in similarly demanding and transient contexts?
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.
The Kaei Ryusui Art Installation stands at a fascinating conceptual crossroads, where impermanence as a philosophical ideal and permanence as a technical achievement exist side by side, with the fleeting beauty of seasonal blossoms and flowing water rendered enduring through blockchain-registered digital identities. How did you navigate the tension between the Japanese aesthetic of mono no aware, which finds profound meaning in transience, and the deliberate act of permanently securing each work on a distributed ledger, and what does this duality ultimately mean to the philosophical integrity of the Kaei Ryusui Art Installation?
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.
One of the most compelling aspects of the Kaei Ryusui Art Installation is how it resolved the challenge of integrating a digital work into a ship's architecture without it reading as a conventional screen display, a problem that many designers working in immersive digital environments struggle to solve with any subtlety. Could you walk us through the specific decisions around the pacing, scaling, and softening of visual transitions that allowed the Kaei Ryusui Art Installation to feel like a living landscape rather than a technological intervention, and at what point in the development process did you know those decisions were working?
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 creative process behind the Kaei Ryusui Art Installation involved a layered methodology, from iterative graphic studies and material experiments with handmade washi paper to the development of fluid imagery in 4K resolution, resulting in a work that moves seamlessly between the tactile and the luminous. What was the most unexpected discovery you made during this process, and how did that discovery fundamentally alter your understanding of what the Kaei Ryusui Art Installation could become as both an artistic statement and an experiential environment?
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.
As a lecturer at Joshibi University of Art and Design, you are actively shaping the next generation of creators, and the Kaei Ryusui Art Installation represents a sophisticated integration of traditional Japanese aesthetics with contemporary digital media and blockchain authentication. How do you see the principles explored in the Kaei Ryusui Art Installation informing the way you teach emerging artists to think about cultural authenticity, ownership, and the preservation of creative identity in a landscape where the boundaries between physical and digital artistic practice are becoming increasingly difficult to define?
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.
The Kaei Ryusui Art Installation transforms the main dining room of a luxury cruise ship into a meditative environment where light, seasonal imagery, and architectural space maintain a continuous and evolving dialogue, and its recognition through the Iron A' Design Award in the Fine Arts and Art Installation Design category places it within a lineage of works acknowledged for originality of concept, emotional impact, and cultural relevance. Considering all of this, what do you hope the Kaei Ryusui Art Installation ultimately communicates to the broader design world about the future possibilities of site-specific digital art in public and commercial spaces where the audience is neither captive nor static?
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.
What is particularly striking about the Kaei Ryusui Art Installation is the decision to print digitally composed imagery onto handmade washi paper rather than displaying it exclusively on screen, creating a physical artifact that carries both the intimacy of traditional craft and the precision of high-resolution digital production. How did you determine the specific visual and material relationship between the eight static washi prints and the central 4K motion sequence, and what does each medium contribute to the overall emotional atmosphere of the Kaei Ryusui Art Installation that the other alone could simply not achieve?
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
For design enthusiasts fascinated by the challenge of creating art that adapts meaningfully to the unique physical and cultural demands of its environment, the Kaei Ryusui Art Installation offers a deeply instructive example of site-specific thinking, having been conceived specifically for a main dining room where passengers experience the work across different times of day, varying states of mind, and the ever-shifting presence of the ocean outside. How did the particular spatial, architectural, and social conditions of a ship's dining environment shape the rhythm, scale, and sensory qualities of the Kaei Ryusui Art Installation, and what would be fundamentally different about this work had it been designed for a fixed, land-based setting?
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.
