Worm & Beetle in Takao
The work that won the award features the tracks of insets left on trees that were rendered into letters. They are about the farthest thing imaginable from what we normally think of as letters, but it is quite interesting that if we look only at the shapes, we might be reminded of drawings by H. Michaux, whose works was inspired by Kanji characters, or the calligraphy of R. Baert, who had an obsession with characters. Our human world is filled with letters but the other worlds are also full of letter-like shapes. If we remove the functions of recording and reading from letter, they too, are just shapes, and I guess our world is also full of other shapes that are like letters. If we were to collect all the letter-like shapes in the world, large and small, artificial and natural, we might have created a great mandala.