We have never been particularly conscious of Ukiyo-e, but we feel that the texture of old Japanese paintings themselves is somehow connected to our works. When the style of our present technique was discovered, the technique that we found in order to express the creatures that loomed out in the dark was depicting "things that exist but are invisible." The method was still vague and seemed to fit the world we wanted to paint, but it felt like fog. While exploring this technique, we began to use gold, silver and iridescent colors, which were necessary to express the expression of light and the feeling of the air, and drew these works, which naturally led to the unique texture of Japanese ancient paintings, and may have been influenced unconsciously!

The artist who left the most impression on us was Reiko Kruk, who came across her collection of works when we were teenagers, became the origin of the use of materials in our current works, and gave us an opportunity to learn about special makeup.

From an early age, we used the tool of painting as a contact between twins, which is different from language, in the sense of idioglossia.

As an extension of that, we create a painting together as one of our communications.

Until a certain period of time, the production method was to throw the atmosphere that flowed between us and "Time, sound, smell, temperature" that we experienced together onto a single canvas without uttering any words. Maybe we made eye contact.

In the past few years, the production method was changed. We make sketches that we both imagine in response to keywords that come out of our mouths at the same time while we are talking, and then merge the sketches to create a piece of work. In the process, the images that we feel in the brain and the heart are the same, but the parts that are missing from each other are combined perfectly to form a single creature or world, which is a thrilling moment for both of us!

The name of EMU means "dream drawing" in Japanese kanji characters, and ERU means "ruri color drawing". Our parents named us. That's why or for some other reason, we've been strongly attracted to dreams, nights and dawn since we were young.

The picture books that we always read when we were children were "The Dream Eater'' (written by Michael Ende, illustrated by Annegert Fuchshuber), "The Halloween Party" (written by Lonzo Anderson, illustrated by Adrienne Adams), "Dawn" (by Uri Shulevitz). While answering this question, we realized again that they had a lot of influence on us!!

In our dreams, the world we imagine sometimes inspires us just like a real world. When we close our eyelids before we go to sleep, we find a strange number of lines and afterimages in the deeper space of our eyelids. Sometimes we just fall asleep instantly though. We love the habit of falling asleep while following the lines and colors that appear, and sometimes they can be seen as one story in a dream.

EMU: My latest dream these days was seeing small arms and legs growing in the eggs, and dancing around and around as they whirl and blink like a sequence of a zoetrope, pre-film animation that uses candle heat. My lovely eggs!!!

A memorable dream was that rainbow-colored fish who are several times taller than my height smile at me and ask me with their eyes to follow them and swim at a tremendous speed on the surface of a huge river that shines like aluminum. For some reason, it feels like I'm walking very slowly, even though I'm floating in the air at the speed of a car on the autobahn. It was a dream that made me smile.

ERU: I had a dream that I dived into the iridescent sea, there was a huge sea slug with golden skin and light blue spots at the bottom of a huge palm tree, and it blinked slowly with big eyes, who had just woken up from sleep, and handed me tiny waves coming and going in the sea, in the palm of my extremely small hand.

Another dream I had was riding on a floating lemon bigger than my body (holding it in my arms) and flying over an empty, midnight road with colorful neon lights blinking. Lemon was flying at low altitude, floating like a wave line, and at the corner with a big building, it suddenly slowed down and turned slowly. Beyond that, a transparent and slightly purple tiger, like a glass, was eating a huge piece of muscat grape that spun at a high speed and was moving away from the bunch. When I was secretly looking at it, the piece of muscat grape suddenly flew toward me and hit my head.

We wonder what it is, but hatred might never have appeared in our work.

We feel that the paradise we envision lies in the space that exists between the real world and the imaginary world. Both of these worlds are visible to us, but the most exciting time for us is the puzzle-ish process that combines the stories and lines of the senses we feel during painting, the emotions about reality and real creatures that come out, to embody the creatures that are thought to be living in paradise. It may be a long way to go to say this, but our work itself is also a respect for everything we've seen and heard that gave us a feeling of pore-opening.

We were introduced to Mr. Konno of NEXUS VII by Mr. Kosuke Kawamura, and after that, we were asked to do "three flamingos" as a commission work, and it was how the collaboration project started.

The collaboration between NEXUSVII and HAMADARAKA by Mr. Konno who works politely and does wonderful work without compromise is full of unique fusion, and every time you see the result, you will be filled with surprise and excitement! We are very happy to have such a wonderful opportunity. There will be another collaboration plan in the future!!

Before we start working on a new project, we talk about our recent dreams in a dark room, plants, fruits, animals, and keywords. As we talked about it, we got more excited about having a similar dream like a joke. From there, the two of us quickly draw a very abstract sketch that becomes a fragment of work, while we select the songs for the image like an association game. For some reason, we often choose Muslimgauze songs for any keywords. After a few days, we look at the sketch again and just walk without carrying anything. When we put ourselves in motion, we can often see a big outline popped out from both the image we talked about and the piece in the sketch.

As we have often experienced abroad, we were influenced by various elements that we encountered in our movements which includes the movement of our bodies, such as the flow of things that do not stay in one place. For example, the sense of "waking up" that we feel from a new language, completely different landscapes, plants, living things, people, and so on, connected to the sense that we have had since childhood and the sense that we can see the production process of HAMADARAKA objectively, and gave us a very interesting effect. Until recently, we think it had been a great source of unusual inspiration from reality.

Now that the environment has changed due to the influence of the coronavirus, we recognize again that the basis of what we draw is a paradise that exists between the real world and the imaginary world, and while creating our own new studio space just like painting a piece little by little, we think that the sudden thunderstorm, lightning, the large and round swollen moon, the smell of the wind that wraps our whole body, and the appearance of the trees that shake with a gust of wind, which we see from the window at the studio, are the inspirations for the creatures we paint.

From a different point of view, such as if we see the normal weeds and the flowers that are less than the size of the little finger in the neighbour park at the same height as the plants in the middle of the night and early in the morning, we can discover a new mystical world that we didn't know until recently even though it was right near us. These days, we regularly go to the beach to pick up shells in shapes we like and spread out various pieces to make creatures like puzzles. We feel that the sense of discovery in that play extends the fusion of the visible and the invisible world even bigger.

We plan to participate in an art festival in Sadogashima, a remote island in Japan, in September.
Held solo exhibition in Tokyo in December.

We are scheduled to participate in a collaboration group exhibition (curated by an etching studio in Thailand and a print studio in Japan) in both Thailand and Japan. Challenging to paint a mosaic.

BETWEEN REAL AND IMAGINARY: INTERVIEW WITH HAMADARAKA

Tumblr: https://hamadaraka.tumblr.com
Special Thanks: Tetsunori Tawaraya