PUBLIC IMAGE takes as its motif idols appointed “police chief for a day,” a publicity practice in Japan in which celebrities briefly assume the title to promote the police. When the glamour of the idol is joined to the public institution of the police, an image of the “ideal person” shared by a given era begins to take shape as a public image.

In this work, an image that may well be forgotten within a few years is fixed onto stone slabs through fresco, a technique made to last. Fresco can hold its form for a thousand years; through it, present-day characters appear as fragments of relics, as if excavated in some future age.

Drawing on the mural’s capacity to serve as record, the work converts images now consumed as transient into a future “history.” Through the new narratives this conversion may open, it asks how images are consumed and preserved, how they are remembered and forgotten, and how “publicness” itself comes to be made.