A passage remains after movement has already gone by. POND 01 — Passage does not depict koi literally. Instead, it preserves the trace of something moving quietly through water. Slender currents of vermilion and charcoal hold their form for a moment, then loosen as they travel, dissolving into a wide white-to-ivory field. The stones remain still while the movement slips past them. The open space left across the picture plane is not treated as a water surface, but as the stillness of the water itself. What moves, and what stays. This work preserves the brief interval that passes between the two. SERIES — POND POND abstracts the presence of nishikigoi and pond stones into movement, stillness, water, and negative space. The fish are not treated as literal subjects. Instead, vermilion, charcoal, ivory, translucent washes, and fine flowing lines suggest their movement through water. Stones shift between dark, pale, sharp-edged, softened, and partially dissolved forms. The open ivory field functions as water itself. POND is built around the tension between two states: motion and stillness. The visual center of each work is not the koi or the stones, but the quiet interval — ma (間, the charged pause between things) — that exists between them. ABOUT RITSUKO NISHIMURA Ritsuko Nishimura works with negative space, light, air, silence, and the moment just before a form disappears. Rather than asking how much more can be added, her work focuses on where to stop. Empty space is not treated as absence, but as a place where light, time, and distance can exist. Starting from recognizable motifs, she reduces them into color, texture, gesture, and interval — leaving room for each viewer to enter the work through their own perception.