Message from the Artist

I sometimes think about my mother and ask myself, “Who is this person?” I know all too well what she looks like, but as far as who she is inside, I haven’t the foggiest idea. Sometimes I look at my significant other and ask myself, “Does this person really exist?” I can touch and talk to this soulmate of mine, but for all I know this person so special to me is actually a ghost. Which reminds me of something that happened last year when I was riding in my soulmate’s car on the expressway. We’d been arguing since the day before and were engaged in a fierce battle of words. Being yelled at in such a loud voice, I got really annoyed and turned to look at the car in the lane next to ours. I saw myself in the driver’s seat. More than thinking I was going crazy, I told myself, “Well, such things can happen.”
I felt like opening the window and saying something, but I stopped. The fact that another me exists maybe shows that I wasn’t wrong in harboring doubts about my mother or significant other. I felt like showing off how smart I was and smiled a self-satisfied smile—and then my soulmate yelled at me again.

Taisuke Nakano

Message from One of the Judges

Taisuke Nakano conspires to disclose to all the world, through expression possible only with photography, the incomprehensible inner side of people.

In his doing so, I sense signs of an emerging change in how identity is expressed through physicality.

Nakano’s photographs, wrapped in a gelatinous film filled with air bubbles that glows the colors of the rainbow, head toward things having a physical connection or toward something inside the body that is absolutely inseparable.

By intentionally cancelling what lies within or by gazing repeatedly at things joined by a tangled magnetic tape or memory medium, he portrays uncertain and sensuous days.

Nakano’s photos confound concepts of time and invite us into a unique world.

From between the legs of the mother sitting before a wrinkled silver space, an enigmatic aluminum tape hangs down.

His photos, having uncovered agonizing over how to expose oneself and weaving things and relationships in detail and experimentally, transport the viewer to an all-new world.

I find appealing the works of this artist who has found interest in building and discovering that world, and I have high expectations.

Arata Dodo (photographer)