Last autumn, the Future Memory team experienced something unforgettable. A family who had provided one of the atomic-bomb artifacts told us about a large unopened box that had been passed down since before the war. It was a keepsake of their parents, who had survived the bombing, and for decades they had been too afraid to open it. They told us they were finally ready to open it together—and asked us to witness it with them. The leather box bore the embossed name of the family’s pharmacy from before the war. 

When they carefully opened it, what appeared inside were vivid, colorful kimonos and dresses. They belonged to two sisters—aged six and one—who had died in the fires of August 6, 1945. A radiant pink dress and a brilliant lemon-yellow kimono filled the room as if time itself had dissolved, glowing across eighty years of time. As the family tenderly lifted each garment one by one, they gasped in wonder. All were born after the war—they had never met their older sisters. And yet, at that moment, they did. Tracing the stitches sewn by their mother’s loving hands, the family felt the presence of the sisters come alive within them. A new memory was beginning to take shape.

Many families who lived through the war have carried with them their own “unopened boxes.” These are memories buried deep within, seemingly forgotten, yet never truly gone. Sometimes, they awaken again—resurrected in vivid color. They come back to us with Colors that embody the simple truth that someone lived, and someone was loved. These Colors teach us that no matter what calamities or hardships befall us, there are things within humanity that can never be lost.
This is the essence of “Colors”— an art concept that reexamines the very nature of life and memory. Life is filled with color—there are as many Colors as there are lives. Even within memory, those colors continue to breathe. Lives once lost continue to shine brightly in remembrance. Thus begins our journey to rediscover those original hues— to seek the True Colors that endure beyond time.