Dialogue of Line and Paper: The Back of a Dress and Materiality

Medium: Analog mixed media (custom aluminum pen, ink, tissue paper collage)

Subject: The back view of a woman wearing a paper dress

Theme: The dialogue between line and color, stories told by the back

Artist: Visual Story Artist Kazue Shima

In addition to the main red dress, variations in green and purple evoke entirely different emotions and atmospheres.

This multiplicity reflects the belief that the countless scenes and stories held in the back of a dress cannot be limited to a single color.

I place my custom-made aluminum pen on the blank white paper.

In this moment, I deliberately avoid imagining the final color. Carrying only the relief of being free from color—and the quiet resolve to draw a single line that cannot be undone—I surrender entirely to the movement of my hand.

The ink held within the aluminum nib is endlessly unpredictable. The slightest lapse breaks the line or sends the ink in unintended directions. Holding my breath, I feel the cold metal against my fingers and the resistance of the paper, adjusting the angle and ink flow with every stroke. My finger, the aluminum, and the paper push and pull against each other. In the sudden release of that tension, a raw, vivid line of a woman’s back appears on the canvas.

Once the struggle with the aluminum pen subsides, a new dialogue begins with the delicate, fragile tissue paper. I release the tension and let my heart soften, surrendering to the vivid red. I scatter patterns freely across the paper, cut boldly through it, and gently lay the spontaneous shapes against the black lines of the back. The infinitely thin red paper never conceals the lines I carved out; instead, it nestles against them like a second skin.

The moment the monochrome back wears this striking red, the lines seem slightly relieved, yet somehow frustrated by being covered. A wordless story quietly takes shape.

For this piece, I chose to forgo the brush entirely, constructing the body’s form solely with my custom aluminum pen. It is a deeply restrictive tool—pressure, angle, speed, and ink flow must all align perfectly for the line to continue.
Yet without this physical resistance, the raw and vivid lines of the human body would never emerge.

In art history, the figure seen from behind—the Rückenfigur—has long served as a powerful device to draw the viewer into the emotional narrative of a scene. Here, the sharp metallic tension of the back’s contours is met with the extreme softness of tissue paper, applied as a collage to serve as clothing, as an object that protects the vulnerable body.

A unyielding line meets a fragile paper. It is only by pushing from these two opposing directions toward the center of expression that I am able to reach the peak of this vision.

Rather than tracing the finished back, I begin by imagining the body line that will flow from the aluminum pen—cutting the metal sheet to shape the nib. Its thickness and smoothness are largely determined by how the pen is formed. Only after the back is drawn do I pick up the tissue paper.

I cut boldly through the colored sheets, and it is only in that moment—looking at the spontaneous shapes—that I begin to see how they might coexist with the body. This tactile, analog process gives the work a human warmth that digital creation cannot replicate.