PPP site

My name is Sakiwa Oshiro, and I run PPP site. I am currently enrolled in the graduate school of Kyoto City University of Arts, where my research focuses on artist books and on the art book fairs that serve as the settings in which they are received. PPP site is a publishing label I launched in January 2026. In my daily practice I work in collaboration with designers and artists to bring a single work into being together, thinking all the while about how private thoughts can be enclosed within, and spread through, the public medium of the book. 　As for my activities so far: in December 2025 I exhibited at the Ibaraki Art Book Fair by THE COPY TRAVELERS, where I presented “Re-Reading (Practice),” a book that documents the act of re-reading books. In January 2026, together with the launch of PPP site, I presented and exhibited 「It Has Not Been / Must Not Be Forgotten That We Waited Longingly for One Another, Different and Alternating」—a collection of correspondence pairing drawings and poems, created under the names of the artist Namiko Toyama and Sawana Naganemine—at the group exhibition “Gyokuosei, Ryuhei Souka, and Namiko Toyama: The Transparent Onion” (gallery gobangura, Kyoto). In June 2026, at Pages Fukuoka Art Book Fair 2026, I exhibited “Skipping stones,” an artist book made to interpret the work of Namiko Toyama.

The publication I plan to exhibit this time is the artist Namiko Toyama's book “Skipping Stones” (矯めつ眇めつ／左見右見). Working from drawings and fragmentary notes on daily life recorded in a notebook, Toyama makes flat works and installations that reconceive fragments of time and memory — paper scraps that each hold the trace of a single point — and, by letting them slide sideways, build maps in which different points sit side by side. The book is built from two ways of looking: observing one thing while shifting your point of view, and narrowing your eyes to study something a little further away. It is made as a device for watching, closely, how Toyama's own way of seeing things moves between near and far, connecting and pulling apart. Moving between book and map, it shifts viewpoints lightly, as if skipping stones, and draws the reader into a continuous kind of play.

The reason I go to the trouble of expressing myself in the medium of the book is partly that I regard the very act of making a book as a form of artistic expression, but above all it is because I feel a strong affinity between self-published works—particularly those in limited editions—and the exhibition, which makes the book a medium well suited to conveying an artist’s thought and the way a work exists. In the process of reproducing a book, even in a small edition, in a state that preserves the traces of the artist’s and my own handwork, and delivering it to viewers within arm’s reach, I find a value equal to that of building an exhibition. Behind this lies inspiration from Seth Siegelaub’s exhibition-on-paper The Xerox Book. Beyond the interest of expression on the page and the shifting images that appear as one turns the pages, I am drawn to the way a book—like a portable exhibition—opens up simultaneously in many different places as a personal experience for each viewer. And when I think of a future in which the internet has fallen into disuse, the very nature of the book as a form means it may be found somewhere fifty or a hundred years from now; I can look forward to the book being carried off to places I myself cannot foresee. That a book, as a medium for opening up private thought, comes to be owned by others and becomes a private possession that remains in the hands of the person who has picked it up—this too is one of my reasons for making books.

When I first began publishing, I learned that the word “publish” carries the meaning of making knowledge or thought public, and that from this it came to mean “to issue in print.” When I think about the history of Iga and of Sukodo—that for some eighty years it was a place beloved by the townspeople as a place for reading and learning centered on its lecture hall, and that it developed from a domain school into a library and then a cultural-property facility—I felt my own activity, “PPP (Private Public Publishing),” and the “site” that embodies it, overlap with this history of the transmission of thought through books. I have also heard that Iga is a place rich in nature, and since my publications include artist books that take nature as their motif in particular, a wish welled up in me to have the people of Iga see them. In addition, I applied to exhibit in the hope that, through meeting all sorts of exhibitors, art books, and visitors, cultures and ideas would intersect, that exchanges I have never experienced before would arise through books and creative activity, and that I might discover new value there as well.