Years ago, when my father passed away, I took a single object from his library in Tokyo: a copy of Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov.

It was not chosen as an artwork.
It was taken as a companion.

Since then, the book has traveled with me—across time, across geographies, across states of being. It has been read, held, carried, and absorbed. Not only intellectually, but emotionally and cerebrally—becoming less a text and more a presence.

A witness.

Over the years, its pages have begun to change function.

They no longer remain intact. They migrate—slowly, deliberately—into the work. Into paintings, into sculptures. Into fragments. What was once bound is now dispersed. What was once narrative is now material.

This piece belongs to that unfolding.

The pages are not used illustratively. They are not quotations. They are traces. Residues of memory, loss, and continuity. Each fragment carries a history—both the author’s and my own—layered, inseparable, and in quiet tension.

The act is not destructive.

It is transformative.

To take a page from this book is to engage in a gesture of release: allowing memory to leave the private space of preservation and enter the field of creation. The object is no longer kept whole—it is lived through, reconfigured, and rearticulated.

In this sense, the work becomes a memento—not of the past as fixed, but of the past as active, evolving, and embedded in the present. A record of passage. Of grief metabolized. Of identity reshaped through time.

There is also a deeper paradox at play:

To preserve something, must it remain untouched?
Or must it be broken apart and integrated into life?

This painting suggests the latter.

It is part of an ongoing series of mementos—works that trace a personal journey not through representation, but through material inheritance. Each piece marks a point along that path: where memory becomes substance, and substance becomes form.

The book remains.

But it is no longer the same.

And neither am I.