Title: Relevantly Nativity, 2025 Medium: Paper clay colored with watercolor, found objects, and recycled materials Scale: 35cm height x 44cm width x 20cm depth.
Relevantly Nativity merges my original characters—stuffed bears, a frog, a mouse—with found objects and cultural moments from 2025 as Nativity figures. When my husband gifted me a Hello Kitty dressed as Myaku-Myaku (the Osaka Expo mascot), it reminded me of Tom Sachs’ Hello Kitty Nativity and inspired me to make my own version.
At the end of 2025, social media was flooded with reflection posts wrapping up the year. I enjoyed watching them, and my bi-cultural background lets me absorb what’s happening in Tokyo and updates from the States simultaneously, so I see double the chaos and double the fascination.
I collected moments that caught my attention: shepherds carrying smartphones **—like us—**instead of crooks, an angel holding a banner that reads “A Viral Headline,” Wise Men bearing a Birkin bag, Gold ETFs, and a Chipotle High Protein Bowl. The stable is made from an Amazon box. In the background, I painted the Park Hyatt Tokyo, which reopened in December 2025, with a bellboy looking at Mary and Joseph apologetically.
One reward of making my own version—rough, handmade, deliberately unpolished—is that I ground myself against the pressure to be a product, to be perfect, to be consumable. Working by hand lets me observe these trends without needing to own them or be part of them. I can simply watch, find them absurd and fascinating, and translate them into something I actually want to see.
