Spring 2024, sitting in a Zen garden in Kyoto. I observed the perfectly raked gravel, divided into precise squares, and realized the deep structure was meant to contain the chaos of human thought.

The technique of drawing a perfect, rigid metal grid first, and then filling each square with quick, spontaneous, almost frantic scratches using the thin, sharp point of a stylus—to map fleeting, messy thoughts within a frame of disciplined structure—was inspired by that meditative containment.