Marked by silver damage, these images evoke my attempt to capture the ghosts and spirits of the Japanese landscape, following the belief in “being spirited away,” which was my research focus during my three month residency at Koganecho Art Center in Yokohama (2024). The project was exhibited as part of my first solo show at Dark Gallery in Copenhagen.
With "I was looking for a Ghost and I found its Silver bones", I aim to bring out the invisible while letting the visible slip through our fingers. I want to initiate a visual conversation between what we actually see and how we see it. As a poetic interpretation of being spirited away, I seek to impose a contemplation of images that will, in one way or another, be taken away by the spirit of light and time.
Sourced from various flea markets around Tokyo, Yokohama, Kyoto, and Osaka, these photographs all bear signs of what restorers call Silver Mirroring: a condition that causes silver ions present in the paper to resurface, a sign of aging and poor storage conditions.
The black paint they are displayed on reflects little to no light, creating a void-like background that enhances the silver’s glimmer. The reflections become more evident from certain angles, compelling the viewer to come closer, move around, and actively search for what is usually invisible to the naked eye.
Delicately pinned to the wood, like iridescent butterflies on display, I playfully reference Barthes’ “punctum”.
Following an aesthetic of accumulated moments—of time come and gone—I employ a mise en abyme (or embedded within itself) approach to time, seeing these photographs as reservoirs of temporality. To some of the compositions, I have added abalone shell.
Taking inspiration from the raden technique, which I discovered during my residency, I experiment with nacre as another materialization of time. Just as tree rings mark the passage of years in wood, each circle, line, and node on the shell represents the ocean’s time stamp—a record of time passing in the life of the material.
Its iridescent nature converses with the subtle sheen of the silver, adding another layer of materiality to the spirits.
As time passes and the ghosts fade, the image deteriorates, and the silver that existed before the photograph was taken returns to its original place on the paper
