These antique Japanese paper bags were purchased at Harakujo, in Tokyo, in 2004. There were originally five — one brown, the others light-coloured like these, all with a stamp and large Japanese characters in black ink on one side only. They all had patches of glued on paper of the same type, most likely from similar bags.

It was only by 2019 that I began the process of translation of the stamp and the handwritten characters. It involved two professional translators and one academic, as the ancient characters, both printed and handwritten, were not legible to contemporary Japanese translators.

For fifteen years, a certain modesty prevented me from using them in my work because I thought that using them would mean modifying them, damaging their physical integrity. But when I learned that these bags had stored silkworm cocoons and that the stamp was simply Nineteenth-century advertising, I understood how, by exhibiting their history in a framed text as if it were a label, my work with them could take the form of a composition that would keep them intact.

In 2021 I made a first work that I called Composition with three Nineteenth-century Japanese paper bags for the storage and carrying of silkworm cocoons and other dry goods, and theatrical black Molton from Russell and Chaple Ltd., Store Street, London. Now, in 2025, in addition to their history the framed text next to them addresses those who read it, and proposes a game.