naoe suzuki - blog: February 2014

There’s nothing pleasant about dealing with sewage water, especially when it floods all over your house. That’s exactly what I had to deal with after coming back from Japan.

Two days after my return, having barely unpacked my suitcase, my condo got flooded with sewage water, not from a frozen pipe, but by an incompetent plumber who was working on the unit above my unit. I had suffered from a jetlag a night before. Being awake since 2am in the morning, I had been working on translation for the description of my work that I was sending to Japan for an auction at a gallery over there. I also translated my bio into Japanese, packaged all those prints, and got them ready to be sent. I skipped lunch and I was getting extremely tired when I drove off to the post office around 2pm. All I could think of was that I would have some light lunch when I get home and just crash in my bed (my own bed!) I got a phone call from my roommate not even five minutes after I left the house. He said that the condo was flooded with sewage water coming out of a toilet on the second floor, and my bedroom was already covered with it, water was coming from the ceiling in the dining room and in my studio, and all the smoke detectors were going off. My upstairs neighbor had called me just before I was leaving my driveway, telling me that they had a plumber working in their unit and not to use the toilet for a while. I had left my roommate a message. This was only five minutes ago, and now my unit is flooded with sewage water? Having jetlag effect, my brain couldn’t quite fathom what was being said.

When I got back, it was already a catastrophe. Brown water was falling from the ceiling, my bedroom was covered by sewage water, all the smoke detectors were going off, and water was still coming out of the toilet, it seemed. It didn’t take a long time to make a huge damage.

It was a disaster.

I’ll skip the disgusting part of cleaning the sewage water. And I’ll skip the stressful part of dealing with disaster afterwards. Most of my condo had to be gut out and replaced. I lived in a hotel for three weeks, and only last week I was able to relocate to a small studio apartment.

I know it could’ve been worse, a lot worse.

Fortunately, none of my new works in the studio were damaged. That was the amazing part. When I got back, I walked into my studio right away, and saw the water falling right near the wrapped artworks. I moved them right away. I was relieved to see that the water was coming from just one part of the ceiling, and not from directly above my rolled up 10 feet drawing, "Blue."

Not so fortunate was everything I had underneath my bed, including some prints I had made at graduate school. I had tucked in many old prints and drawings there, and they were all damaged. Some of them were work prints, and most of them were thin rice papers, so a lot of got damaged very quickly.

So for the sentimental reasons, I’ll post some photos of these works. I still have most of the prints that I actually used for these installations. But I always made more, in case I wanted to make the size of installation larger. And those extra prints were the ones I put them underneath the bed.

Neglected children always end up with their future ruined.