Sayaka Akiyama comes from Japan. Over the last 19 years, She has traveled to roughly 50 places in Japan and overseas, continuing to create work while living her day-to-day life in the places. Her creations are the results of these travels, when she gets to know places through her senses, and stitches the objects she collected into works.

Her work digs up the traces of time in everyday life. It extracts the things that are otherwise unconsciously accumulated, the ordinary flow of time without special meaning. And she freezes these moments of time inside her work like a vacuum pack—not buried in the past, but continuing to exist in the present. Stitching is for her a vital action. Her work is complete after going through three journeys: traveling to a place to create, traveling inside the work, and, lastly, traveling inside herself. 

“Yokosuka” made in 2013 documents her thoughts in Yokosuka City. This time, unfortunately, she is not able to make it to Caotun due to COVID-19. She is, therefore, asking someone to send her objects uniquely from the town, so she can put together the piece “Connection: 9 Stories” from her imagination of the place. However, the "things" were from what she imagined. It was full of individuality. It was difficult to understand these. She had no choice but to understand each other by touching each "thing" one by one. As a result, it became a "letter of communication with things" rather than a word.

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