What is the signifiant? (2025) Fotografia da Shuzo Takechi

I am based in the outskirts of Matsudo, Chiba, and my work centers on subtle visual phenomena that often go unnoticed in urban and peripheral environments—unstable states of perception in which structure has yet to settle, and meaning has not yet taken form.

When I encounter the edges of domains that stand in contrast to conceptual structures, or those that have not yet entered into relation with them—spaces that contain a surplus of indeterminacy—I try to distance myself from thought, from prior visual experience, and approach the subject in an unselfconscious state.

Unconscious, bodily judgments—natural responses of the senses that arise without awareness—give rise to vague impressions. Some of these are eventually taken up into meaning and concept; others dissipate beyond the boundaries of conceptualization, like mist.

I place myself within this field of emergence and disappearance, bearing witness to the faint moment in which meaning begins to surface, and I continue a practice of recording and presenting what occurs there.

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Visual information circulates as language once it has been conceptualized.
Yet in that very moment, the bodily dimension—the layer of pre-conceptual sensation that triggered the concept—is quietly set aside, as if its role were already complete.

My interest lies in the zone that stretches between concepts and their outside.
There, elements with seemingly self-evident conceptual force coexist—on the surface—with the unknowable and the ambiguous:
that is, with content that perception has not yet structured through language or concepts—non-conceptual content.
Yet this coexistence is, in truth, governed by an asymmetry.

The “I” that presumably exists within the world of concepts attempts to engage with non-conceptual content through the act of seeing—but is that truly possible?

My practice is a sustained attempt to extract what might lie outside of concepts through acts of recording.
Some of what emerges becomes conceptualized; some vanishes like mist.
This ongoing process—of witnessing the threshold where appearance and disappearance meet—constitutes the whole of my work.

This endeavor may appear somewhat banal.
That is because I am already speaking from within the realm of concepts.
But without fearing that banality, I wish to remain here,
and continue to bear witness to the traces of what has not yet been spoken.

• Nazionalità: GIAPPONE
• Data di nascita : 1973
• Domini artistici: Opere di artisti professionisti,
• Gruppi: Artista professionista Artisti Giapponesi Contemporanei