中林 遼太朗

I started drawing in high school. It still strikes me: what we made stayed, and we could talk to each other through it.

In medical school I met the opposite problem: people who unmistakably exist, slowly losing their outline. I spent two years as a resident at Tohoku University Hospital, and I am now a graduate student at the Institute of Development, Aging and Cancer, studying blood-based biomarkers of dementia — looking for what begins to happen in a brain that still tests as healthy.

Drawing and diagnosing turned out to be the same work. Both were ways of giving what had no words yet a form that two people could talk about.

These days, alongside clinical work and research, I build web apps — a library indexed by memory, a notebook for medical students. I am imagining a world where art, technology and medicine are continuous, and making something toward it every day.