木村肇

Hajime Kimura

Family of lies

Family of lies is a project that will help me rethink my past work on my own family.

Looking back on myself, I have not had much time to consider why I am so badly attracted to my family, upbringing, and environment.
I had little time to think about it while creating the work.
By "badly," I mean the relationship between myself and my family, which existed from childhood to early adulthood. In that time, I considered my family an embarrassment.
I lived in a house in the suburbs, just an hour or so by train from Tokyo city centre. Reflecting on it, we were not a family complaining openly about anything. Perhaps it was a feeling that everyone has at least once around puberty. But at the time, I always had the habit of imagining a false image of my family somewhere in my mind. Eventually, I would return to the dream to escape the feeling that I, too, was a member of the false family, as if I were its alter ego.
Perhaps a 'false family' could be rephrased as an 'ideal family'.
My mother passed away when I was 16, and my father passed away when I was 29. Even after my parents ceased to exist, I continued to proclaim they were still alive.
Through those experiences, I wanted to examine my past actions: why I behaved that way, why I tried to convince myself of it, and why I deliberately chose it for my family as a work.

I opened the front door one morning and watched my mother and father fighting. As soon as I closed the door,
it was as if the fight had never happened, and I went to elementary school as an ideal family member.
A mirror has been hanging in the foyer for as long as I can remember.
Whenever I went outside, I had to pass in front of it.
There was a time when I stopped looking at it so much.
I don't remember exactly when and for how long, but I pretended that the mirror did not exist for a long time.

The mirror occasionally looked back at me as time passed, and I did not return to my dream.
I realized I was the only member of my false family in the mirror.
After I removed the seal of false memories, I emerged,
I was still seeing the other me in the mirror.