Thank you, the postman

December 31, 2003EXHIBITIONS

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Year: 2003
Media: Installation
Venue: kyoto Municipal Museum of Art, kyoto, japan

It’s easy to find the postman in our life. I wanted to say thank you to the postman all around Japan, so I wrote letters for them.  I wrote different massages and changed my handwriting as if I were another person. I sent forty seven postcards for each prefecture.

The way of telling thank you to the mailman is like this; I wrote my name, my address and “thank you” massage on the front of the letters, and I filled in incorrect address of the recipients on the back. It made the postman see the front of the postcard to check the sender so he read my “thank you” messages.

I wanted to get forty different seven postmarks from all of the forty seven prefectures. I tried to post as many as possible by myself and I asked my friends to post the rest of them instead of me. The postcards have arrived to me from all over Japan, from Hokkaido to Okinawa.

Thirty out of forty seven postcards have come back from December 2003 to February 2004. My messages had appeared to the postman for a while, and they finally returned to me. I don’t know how many postmen read my messages and where are my postcards which haven’t been returned yet. But I’m sure that this project actually suceeded because I got the different postmarks and the seals with the postman’s names.