Minoru Inoue was born in 1970. He entered the painting department of an art university and later deciding to leave. Since then, he has continued to pursue painting in his own unique way. Inoue's motifs are mainly plants and insects that live by the roadside—things that we do not pay attention to in our daily lives. However, this does not mean that Inoue is singularly interested in turning "small things" or "sublimate unnoticed things" into works of art. Perhaps it is how we look at things that is important. Things like grass, flowers, and insects seem to be just there by chance. (However, there are insects and weeds that Inoue prefers to use as motif’s and prefers not to use. When capturing the real world in the two-dimensional space of painting, it is difficult to represent the space that is right in front of us. This is because it requires constant selection and abstraction of what we see. The natural human gaze in the awake state is horizontal, but if you try to capture the world with this horizontal gaze, the depth is unending. What I see in front of me now is the edge of a desk. --floors and walls, chairs and tables--window frames--streets--fences I can see the edge of the desk -- the trunk of a tree -- the sky glimmering beyond the leaves of a tree. It seems almost impossible to transfer them to the two-dimensional plane. However, if you look at the floor from above, your gaze will stay on the ground and a flat space will naturally emerge. I believe that the place of experimentation in painting since the 20th century has been in this reduction of three dimensions to two dimensions. Rather than reproducing a three-dimensional space in a flat plane in an illusionistic way, capturing and depicting a three-dimensional space in a flat plane spurred the pursuit of "self-referential painting," and it can be said that the last 100 years have been a fruitful century of painting that has produced a rich space. However, the various attempts at painting by these artists simultaneously allowed "novelty" to be appreciated. In the end, painting itself became old-fashioned, and it began to collapse on itself. From "modern" to "post-modern," "self-referential painting" went from being a problem on a flat surface to having meaning, context, and concept at its core. In the 1990s, Inoue tried to be aware of the times and incorporate the current trends in his work, but it all went wrong. In the 2000s, he finally let go of this approach and shifted to a method that eliminates his own will and intentions as much as possible. He would take pictures on the street and put paint on the canvas accordingly. There is no reworking after it is finished. Since there are no do-overs, he paints carefully, little by little, and even a small canvas can take months to finish. Instead of controlling and expressing himself, he paints his subjects with an attitude of a mediator, which may seem somewhat backward and contradictory to the act of creation. However, it can be said that this approach corresponds to the current trend in philosophy, which is moving from anthropocentrism to a new materialism. Inoue's paintings, stripped of the impurities of artifice, are like pure crystal, radiating a solid beauty that combines eternal peace and tension.