Infinite Shadow, Katsutoshi Yuasa, 25. Mai bis zum 6. Juli

Infinite Shadow

What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially – Roland Barthes

Photography is one of the most important elements in Yuasa’s work. It is an art of light, capturing one moment that happened once in the past. The core essence of Yuasa’s work may not be an image captured by a camera. Rather, what viewers see is more like a moment that is ruled by a particular timeframe created by the artist.

Photographic images in Yuasa’s work essentially differ from photographs taken by cameras. A camera freezes a moment from the actual world. As Roland Barthes describes, “A specific photograph, in effect, is never distinguished from its referent.” When I look at Yuasa’s prints, I do not see a referent that can be found in photographic images. Instead, through the process of hand-carving and hand-printing, Yuasa transforms a moment of time into infinity with his machine-like systematic manual labor. He slices a moment captured by a camera into countless lines and pixels embedding the amount of time that he spends carving each image. While his precise system is accurate, his hands naturally produce flaws, unique distortions, and textures, ultimately adding to the overall effect.

On the surface of Yuasa’s prints, the amount of time spent for this artistic process emerges as unusual gravity. His carved lines trace a referred photograph with varied details created by hand-printed ink. His work contains an unwavering infinite image with countless fluctuations and a mesmerizing blurriness. The original photographic image is now transmitted with noises into a stretched moment converted by Yuasa’s unique timeframe and gravity.

From a photographic perspective, I see an image in Yuasa’s work as a shadow of the real world. He chooses images that convey the sense of emptiness – shadows of monuments, voids from our everyday life, and lack of human control. A moment of light is gone, but the shadow remains on its own. What is Yuasa’s Passion and Obsession in his work? As suggested in the novel, Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami, another world may exist within a moment, where a moment is untwined into multiple threads and continues to infinity. Residents of the End of the World live happily without fear of death. They won’t die because their time is always divided into multiples and never reaches the end. However, their minds are emptied. This gives us insight into Yuasa’s work. His time and labor-intensive process transforms the real world into multiple shadows prolonged to infinity. Perhaps, he is attaching his own gravity and weight to the emptiness and lightness of our real world, which otherwise might disappear.

Mayumi Hamanaka
Curator, Kala Art Institute (Berkeley, CA, USA)