Jun Homma (b. 1967, Tokyo) is an artist based in Kanagawa, Japan. He graduated from the Department of Three-Dimensional Design at Tama Art University in 1990. In 2019, he was a recipient of the Japanese Government Overseas Study Program for Artists and was based in Berlin.

Since the 1990s, his practice has focused on sculpture and installation, with invisibility as its central axis. His works construct situations where relationships emerge, in which invisible elements shape perception, meaning, and the formation of images. Since around 2000, he has developed site-specific works and art projects that engage with the historical and social contexts of particular places. In these works, invisible elements embedded in various environments emerge in relation to the site. This practice has been developed through site-specific projects in contexts such as the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale, the Setouchi Triennale, and the Koganecho Bazaar. In recent years, his work has focused on the uncertainty of time and history through processes such as erosion, disappearance, and absence. As parts of landscapes or constructed forms recede from visibility, events emerge in fragments, and multiple temporalities intersect.

Selected projects and exhibitions include Uncertain Stories (eitoeiko, Tokyo, 2025), Time and Boat (CPI, Chengdu, 2024), and the Koganecho Bazaar (Yokohama, 2024).

Can you tell us about your background and how you started your artistic journey?

Through my work, I explore the relationship between the “visible” and the “invisible” that shape our world.

I grew up in the suburbs of Tokyo in the 1970s, a period often referred to as Japan’s era of rapid economic growth. The original landscape for me was one that continued to change through rapid urban development. Woods that had been my playground as a child were stripped away and turned into blank spaces of cleared land, like a void. Into those spaces, I projected my imagination, as if layering the landscapes that had already been lost. These experiences are connected to my practice.

Since the 1990s, I have been working mainly with sculpture and installation, and gradually became interested in invisible elements such as time, memory, and history that lie behind materials and landscapes. I think of my work as an attempt to evoke and make perceptible those invisible elements through space and material.

Your work often reflects on landscapes, memory, and change. How have your early experiences of place shaped the way you think about your practice today?

I think that landscapes are shaped by the people who have been involved with them, and that people, in turn, are shaped by the landscapes they have lived in and grown up with. However, this relationship is often not visible.

For me, a landscape is not simply a visible surface, but something formed through the overlapping of time, memory, historical events, and social and economic forces. Having grown up watching landscapes change through urban development, I have a sense that landscapes are not fixed, but are constantly being rewritten and updated.

For this reason, in my work, even when I work with materials or landscapes, I pay attention to the past time and background that they carry. For example, I place objects from different times and contexts and reconfigure their relationships so that they appear as if they exist along a single timeline, creating situations in which multiple times and histories intersect.

Your practice moves across sculpture, installation, video, and site-specific works. How do different contexts or environments shape the direction of a piece?

I do not determine the form of my work in advance. Rather than fixing specific techniques or materials, I place importance on changing them according to the situation. When I create work for a specific site, I begin by researching invisible elements such as the history of the place, events that have happened there, and the memories accumulated in it. However, these elements do not necessarily appear directly in the work. Rather, I place importance on reinterpreting them and constructing the work through shifts and transformations.

In my work, structures related to the invisible—such as assimilation, concealment, and absence—often appear. Through these structures, I aim to create situations in which invisible elements come into being within space.

By placing objects from different times and contexts together, or by removing parts of images, I create situations in which multiple times intersect.

How has your artistic style evolved over time?

I have been making works with themes of invisible elements and emptiness. In my earlier works, I was interested in elements such as blankness and absence, as well as in phenomena in which the work itself assimilates into its environment and its existence slips out of recognition.

I was interested not only in things slipping away or becoming unrecognized, but also in how, through the uncertainty of perception, images whose meanings remain unfixed begin to emerge.

In the spring of 2011, while I was performing a piece that assimilated into the landscape in a field of rapeseed flowers in the suburbs of Kanagawa, Japan (later developed into the video work Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter), the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident occurred following the Great East Japan Earthquake. Although the site of the accident was far away, there was a pastoral and beautiful landscape in front of me. At the same time, invisible radioactive substances might have been falling there. At that moment, I was confronted with fear and beauty coexisting, and I strongly recognized that the world is shaped by invisible elements. This experience became a major turning point in my awareness of the invisible.

As I continued my work, it became clear that the problem of the invisible is not limited to visual phenomena, but is deeply connected to time, memory, history, and also to social structures, and time became a central theme of my practice.

In my recent series Uncertain Stories, I explore situations in which multiple times and histories intersect by fragmenting and combining objects from different cultures and periods. In Now and Things, I attempt to make time itself present as material through processes in which everyday scenes and physical objects collapse, disappear, and emerge.

These works are also influenced by the Zen concept of “sokkon” (the absolute now), which I encountered during the COVID-19 pandemic. We can only face things at a single point called “now,” but within that “now,” past and future are contained at the same time. Through the presentness of things and events, my work is also a practice of bringing forth the invisible structure of time itself.

What do you hope people take away from your art when they experience it?

My work does not exist as something complete from the beginning, but establishes a situation in which it comes into being through the viewer’s perception and imagination. Fragmented objects and missing elements do not limit meaning, but rather become triggers that evoke multiple images and times.

Through the work, multiple times overlap within a single moment called the present, and I intend to establish a situation in which that perception is not fixed, but constantly shifting and uncertain, comes into being.

What advice would you give to emerging artists trying to establish themselves?

It is very difficult for me to give advice, but I think what is important is to reconsider the kind of urgent expression I want to pursue within the broader context of the world, history, and society. This is not easy, but it also means continuing to question my own practice from the outside.

This process is never stable, and at times I find myself at a loss. I am still in the middle of this inquiry.

Text and photo courtesy of Jun Homma

Website: https://junhomma.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jun.homma/