Kaori Saejima Work | Simple & Free

In the context of the series, Kaori Saejima's "work" is defined by her role as a mother and socialite within the elite "Sky Castle" residential complex, where she is intensely focused on her son's academic success.

Critics have placed Saejima within the lineage of mono-ha (the “School of Things”), which emphasized encounters between raw materials and perception. But where mono-ha artists like Lee Ufan used stone and steel to highlight phenomenological presence, Saejima uses dust, paper, and light to explore phenomenological absence . She is closer to the novelist Yoko Ogawa, who writes of memory as a fragile library, or the filmmaker Naomi Kawase, who finds the sacred in the decaying natural world. Her true contemporaries, however, may be the anonymous scribes of the Heian period, who wrote love letters on thin, easily torn torinoko paper, knowing that the physical letter’s decay mirrored love’s own fleeting nature. kaori saejima work