Half Mirror is a series I composed of the snapshots taken between 2003 and 2006 for my solo exhibition held at Gallery Space Rondish, then located in Semba, Osaka, in 2006. I remember being at a loss — sitting with Hitomi Kintani, the gallery director, discussing the random images I gathered, with no idea how to select or arrange them. I had just graduated from a night photography college, indifferent to the themes I should pursue, to any critical relationship with the communities I belonged to, to the voice my own body and mind were sending out. Yet I was lured by the mysterious gaze of others, to the surfaces of reflecting objects, and to nature, all of which looked back when looked at.
"In a forest, I have felt many times over that it was not I who looked at the forest. Some days I felt that the trees were looking at me, were speaking to me…. I was there, listening…. I think that the painter must be penetrated by the universe and not want to penetrate it…. I expect to be inwardly submerged, buried."
(André Marchand, quoted in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Eye and Mind, trans. Carleton Dallery, in The Primacy of Perception, ed. James Edie, Northwestern University Press, 1964)
The strong resonance I feel with these words has never diminished in the least, even now, more than a quarter century after I first began to photograph. The infinite complexity of the world as it appears to the eye — how could one ever claim to have truly seen it? The camera is a probe through which the world penetrates me, reversing and being reversed between the one who sees and the one who is seen; a half-mirror that reflects my figure in translucence.
(June 2026)
Half Mirror is a series I composed of the snapshots taken between 2003 and 2006 for my solo exhibition held at Gallery Space Rondish, then located in Semba, Osaka, in 2006. I remember being at a loss — sitting with Hitomi Kintani, the gallery director, discussing the random images I gathered, with no idea how to select or arrange them. I had just graduated from a night photography college, indifferent to the themes I should pursue, to any critical relationship with the communities I belonged to, to the voice my own body and mind were sending out. Yet I was lured by the mysterious gaze of others, to the surfaces of reflecting objects, and to nature, all of which looked back when looked at.
"In a forest, I have felt many times over that it was not I who looked at the forest. Some days I felt that the trees were looking at me, were speaking to me…. I was there, listening…. I think that the painter must be penetrated by the universe and not want to penetrate it…. I expect to be inwardly submerged, buried."
(André Marchand, quoted in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Eye and Mind, trans. Carleton Dallery, in The Primacy of Perception, ed. James Edie, Northwestern University Press, 1964)
The strong resonance I feel with these words has never diminished in the least, even now, more than a quarter century after I first began to photograph. The infinite complexity of the world as it appears to the eye — how could one ever claim to have truly seen it? The camera is a probe through which the world penetrates me, reversing and being reversed between the one who sees and the one who is seen; a half-mirror that reflects my figure in translucence.
(June 2026)