From the crucible, filled with chaos and complexity, comes a powerful story that puts forth a question to us. Shun Kumagai's work, while signifying elements of various eras and cultures, makes us aware of our "present" place in time. The chaotic expressions unique to his work are crafted through his merging of odd and foreign materials, such as earth and metals, with melted glass, and built by way of layered complexities. In a furnace heated to 1000 degrees, melted glass flows into a hollow plaster cast, filling the empty spaces and tracing a fluid trajectory, while the earth that is burned into its surface obscures the clarity of the glass, but in turn bestows upon it a chaotic, temporal beauty. Kumagai says of this coexistence within a singular form or shape with foreign materials such as earth and metals that "the act of creating a shape in which foreign materials coexist is in itself beautiful." The pleasure and joy of expressing celestial, transcendental sensations, in the forms of temporal and fluid energies, of various coincidences overlapping one another in complex layers, could be said to be the origin of his creativity.