ARTIST'S STATEMENT

[1]
How awfully good it feels in the warm embrace of my inner mother.
I have trouble remembering my mother’s face whenever she acted in her role as a mother.
Motherhood-as-self-sacrifice feels like a woven yarn, warm and tangled, wrapped tightly around my impaired body.
 
Parricide by children has not only been the topic in psychological analysis but also the theme of major works of literature and art, in forms like the Oedipus Complex, the Ajase Complex and so on…
But mothers murdered by their daughters seems to be a special, rare case. Japanese psychologist Tamaki Saito says: “Mother and daughter share the same body, through which they are united. The negation of the mother means the negation of oneself.”
 
“The first child for Takeshi, the second for Mai.”
The Takeshi here is my father, Mai my sister.
I recently found that line in my mother’s nursing diary. I can’t get the idea out of my head—a person “for someone else”.
 
I had thought I could accept myself by denying my self and conforming to others.
For many children, the first other in life is the mother.
I believed I could save myself by being sensitive to the desires of others (in whom I saw my mother), and by making myself a person who is convenient for other people.
But it is not so easy to do. I could never be whom others wanted me to be, whom my mother wanted me to be.
 
Now, I have to perform my own initiation rite. Unless I kill the mother in my imagination and begin to stand on my own two feet, I realized, I will forever live relying on the control of someone else, my mother.
 
 
[2]
It was about ten years ago.
I was completely absorbed in cosplay, an act of imitation that involves dressing up as characters from anime and manga, and noticed something strange.
As my friend and I kept dressing up as male characters from Boys Love games, a complicated kind of love began to develop between us. We loved each other not as girls but as the BL characters we dressed up as.
We did not face each other with our usual genders or as the persons we were. The emotional love we felt when cosplaying as BL characters began, secretly, to pervade our everyday lives and developed into a real feelings between us.
 
 
At the time, we both pretended not to notice the feelings happening between us. As we continued roleplaying the BL characters to catch a further glimpse of their fictitious (real) stories, before we knew it we had started enacting a story that differed from theirs; a story about them but not really them, one that belonged to us, tied to reality.
 
 
                                                                                                
Artwork description
The artist YuKI YUKI contributes two video artworks to the sale. They were displayed on the back and inside the womb of a giant knitted doll, an installation piece first unveiled as part of the “Listen to her Song” group exhibition at Tokyo University of the Arts in 2020.
The title “For your own good” is an attempt to unravel the artist’s stagnant mother-and-daughter relationship, a bond marked by self-sacrifice, devoted service and control by the mother.

In the video piece placed at the back of the knitted figure, the artist externalizes the ‘inner mother’ controlling her in the form of knitted fabric that she then breaks up and sheds like skin—an initiation rite through matricide. But the result is failure, and the artist only becomes closer with her inner mother. The piece depicts the difficulty involved for a daughter to kill her mother.

Therefore, instead of engaging her inner mother, the artist decides to face her real mother by knitting a giant woolen doll together. It is modeled after “Sanko, the third daughter”, a baby doll that the mother caressed and loved in place of her two daughters after the artist and her sister had grown up.

The video artwork placed within the womb of this giant “Sanko” depicts the romantic relationship developing between two BL cosplayers (“Boys Love”, a manga genre involving homoerotic stories). In the video, the artist and her friend, both cosplaying as male characters, slowly unravel each other’s woolen masks and clothes, as if undressing one another. In the process, they unravel their woolen penises until they disappear. As they untie each other’s fabric, the love between them grows deeper.

By inserting the special kind of love depicted in the video into the doll—the loving maternal bond that never truly materialized—the artist attempts to unravel her stagnant relationship with her mother.

The special love came originally came about when the artist engaged in BL cosplay ten years ago, together with the friend who also appears in the video. As they continued roleplaying the relationships of BL characters, the fictional love they acted out began to pervade into their everyday reality.

As they superimposed various roles—cosplay, gender, male-to-male relationships and so on—onto their own bodies in the world of play, the gender roles and archetypes forced upon us in the real world slowly collapsed, and in a way they were able to love each other unburdened and with purity.
This love, free of any preconceived stereotypes, becomes the key in unblocking a relationship that suffocates under the fixed roles of mother and daughter. And further, it can show us a new kind of sexual love.

Condition Report
Written by Startbahn, Inc.
 
This token was minted on the Startbahn platform called Startrail, which is built on the Polygon blockchain, a Layer 2 sidechain to the Ethereum blockchain.
The Startrail solution built on Polygon where this NFT currently exists is constructed with a thoughtful approach to users and artists deal with art works. 
The security of the token meets standard ERC721 levels, and the solution includes standard ERC721 functions for transferability, but the addition of extra contract functions to enable specific features on the Startrail. 
The tokens created by the Startrail contracts (these are the groups of backed contracts Startbahn uses for the extra functions provided by the platform) do meet ERC721 standards for function use, and can be ported to the ethereum mainnet. What this means is that even though Startbahn recommends users create an email based wallet through tor.us, the tokens can be transferred directly to any ethereum address if desired by the buyer. The buyer may also transfer this NFT to the ethereum main network but additional transaction costs will incur.
To receive this NFT, the preferred way is for the buyer to create a Startbahn Cert. account (https://cert.startbahn.io/en) with their email address. The usage of Startbahn Cert. is free of charge. 
The access to the artwork file(s) is limited to the holder and issuer of the NFT. All ownership history and genuinity of the artwork is securely stored in the Startrail Registry Record (SRR). Even after the NFT work is sold at the auction held by SBI Art Auction Co., Ltd., the artist can apply the terms of use for the NFT holder by agreeing in advance with the current NFT holder. If the terms of use are set, it is necessary for SBI Art Auction Co., Ltd. to set it in the NFT. The latest version of terms of use show always on the viewer page of work of Startbahn Cert.The buyer may resell this NFT via NFT marketplaces, galleries, auction houses or off-chain markets, and transfer the NFT ownership to the next owner via Startbahn Cert.
For further information like as usage of digital wallet services other than tor.us, or how to resell the NFT, Startbahn will send guidance to winning bidders.

Startbahn Condition Reports are statements of opinion only and not representation of fact. The reports are non-exhaustive and based solely on information provided to Startbahn and/or obtained by Startbahn prior to sale, unless otherwise specified. The reports may make reference to a lot’s smart contract details and history, metadata and/or media file specifics, storage, and/or origin, and other token features, however such reports may not refer to or identify all faults and potential vulnerabilities that may exist. The images of a lot form part of the condition report for the lot, however certain images of a lot provided online may not accurately reflect the actual condition of the lot. Condition reports may make reference to particular imperfections of a lot, although the lot may have other faults or issues not expressly referred to in the condition report for the lot or shown in the online images of the lot.

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 NOTICE
１．About NFT
NFT (Non-Fungible Token)s for this sale are minted on the platform called "Startrail" provided by Startbahn Inc.. Startrail is built on Polygon blockchain, a Layer2 sidechain of Ethereum, and NFT generated on Startrail meets ERC721 standards.
 
2. Relevance between NFT and Digital data
An NFT is a digital asset which creates a tokenized proof of title to a unique digital version of an underlying digital asset (such as images, videos or other digital content) .  The digital data of the artworks is not included in NFT, and it is not recorded on the blockchain where the NFT issuance and transactions are recorded.
 
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The bidding deadline will be 5:00PM on Friday October 29, 2021(JST).
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Buyer’s premium is the same as Modern and Contemporary Art auction and is 15% of the hammer price (exclusive of tax).
 
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