This rice paper is produced in a totally different way from what we’d normally think. I didn’t know [how] at first either. I thought it was just made from average straw, bamboo, etc. Common materials can certainly work—bamboo or any other plant material works for the most part—but the most important material is bark, and it has to be local bark. This bark determines all the secrets of this rice paper. It is different from all other paper, and all because of this bark.

So in China, only the Anhui Province has this tree, so only Anhui can really make this kind of paper. Other places that make it cannot really be considered Chinese-made xuan paper [“rice paper”]. This material, after nearly a thousand years of development, this kind of technology is very, very sophisticated, although it is a very manual method, very simple, but it is very skilled. Now in fact, Western papermaking has also adopted this method. It’s very similar.

For the work in this exhibition, we went to a village in the south to find farmers who make this paper professionally. They spend their entire lives in this village making paper. They took this request that I was going to use and, based on my assistant’s help, they added this fireproof material. So it’s a very difficult job, and it has to be done at a specific time, and we usually have to give them three months. So in these three months, I have to go cut the bamboo. The bamboo was not picked at random. This work seems very simple—it’s made by hand, but actually its technique is quite demanding. It requires very strong hand-working abilities to assemble what you finally see in the complete work. It requires a completely traditional hand-worked system of execution.

The time it takes to process bamboo is different from the time it takes to process paper. It actually takes a little more time than paper. After it is washed clean, it needs to be treated with heat, and while it’s in the furnace, it has to be straightened using tools.

Every piece of paper has to go through a repeated process [of crumpling]. It can’t be [crumpled] too hard, or too softly, and [the crumpled paper] can’t be [uncrumpled] with too much force. So it seems to be a very simple job, but in fact, six out of eight people working on this do not meet my standards.

Wave of Materials means “Mono-ha” in Japanese [an art movement known as The School of Things]. The word “material” comes from the character “mono” or “thing” in Japanese. Wave of Materials is also connected to the kind of waves they used to paint in traditional Japanese woodblock prints of the nineteenth century, which also had a certain influence on French Impressionism in the nineteenth century. I put it all together and it was natural to find a meaning like that.