SADATAKA AMMI

Sadataka Ammi

 

Visual artist

 

1987 Born in Kanagawa, Japan

Lives and works in Berlin who does digital painting.

 

In September 2018, Ammi moved to Berlin and began his project "1000-Sen" on 10 February 2019. The project is based on one simple rule:  "Draw people I met."
 

Berlin is home to many immigrants and refugees who live together with those who were born and raised there. Their specific cultures do not merge with the German culture but coexist as a mosaic of cultures, each with its own outline and interactive relationship. It is this particular situation that attracted him to Berlin. Ammi decided that this environment was the best place to start this journey.
Ammi considers "encounter" as the most important practice in this project. The repetition of encounters and partings that we experience over and over again in our interactions with people raises fundamental human questions about life and death. There are supposed to be 8 billion people living in the world. However, we have no way of knowing for sure if they really exist, and we receive this information tentatively. It is only when they meet each other, or when a subsequent reunion is possible, that we can definitively recognize that a person is alive. The moment we separate from each other, we become ambiguous and ambivalent. 

Ammi contemplates how we humans manage our desires at the most basic level through this practice.
Portraits created in digital media are made up of component square pixels. As the work grows, they connect with each other to form a rectangle, which then transforms into a line. Imaginatively, the line continues to expand along the circumference of the earth, eventually circling back to its original location to form a circle. Ammi's aim is to continue drawing this line. There is almost no interaction between the people depicted in the project, with a few exceptions. However, through this project, they are able to identify with each other as beings in the same boat. This is a very weak connection, not the strong connection that exists between family and friends. Apart from this, they have developed their own relationships, cultivated by their individual experiences. By connecting these personal networks to the project, Ammi attempts to connect with people on the other side of the world.
"This project will forever be in an unfinished state. As long as I do not stop drawing. Who would you draw?