Since I started Equivocal Landscape in 1998, I have made one drawing every day in 5.9-by-8.5 inch sketchbook with a 0.2mm-black micro-pigment-ink pen. These drawings began as visual impressions of my memories of each day in the form of a tree, the Chinese ideograph for which forms part of my surname, Hayashi. The sketchbooks have numbered over 100 volumes. The 72 drawings in each sketchbook appear only on the recto with brief number and color annotations on the verso. The pages of the sketchbooks have no internal narrative connections to each other, but time runs through them chronologically.

As of January 2024, I am currently working on Sketchbook Vol.111.

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Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go inspired me to perceive how we identify ourselves not by what we look like, but by our memories. This inspiration intensified my interest in memory and spurred me to "gaze" at memory to observe what I am. Creating this work has led me to realize that we can never visualize ourselves directly, but must conceive ourselves according to what our memories tell us about the nature of ourselves even if they are not always accurate. Each drawing has become central to presenting "I" of the day; each rendition develops a hieroglyphic-like letter in which my memories melt into lines and dots.

Equivocal Landscape has also become the groundwork for some of the other projects, such as Corrections, Interior Landscape, Landscape of the Day and Echoes of the Lines. In these projects, I add other visual forms to the drawings, which I selected from the sketchbooks, such as colors, words, shapes, textures and photographic images.

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*Title: e.l. 94:13 (New York:light green:7.21.20) :

The work appears on the 13th recto in Sketchbook Vol. 94. I drew the drawing on July 21, 2020 in New York. 'light green' is a color annotation representing my mood of the day on the 13th verso (the back side of the drawing page) in the sketchbook.

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