This work is a device for observing the past and the present.

In the space on the first floor, I have installed an object modeled after a signboard, bearing text that once introduced the lantern shop that operated here. The light illuminates a scene from the past that has become increasingly difficult to perceive with the passage of time, functioning as a device that redirects the viewer’s gaze from the present toward the past.

Beside it, the line of sight of a telescope extends across the first-floor space. At its far end is a monochrome photograph of the former storefront. The photograph is difficult to perceive with the naked eye; it can only be clearly seen by looking through the telescope.

The form of the telescope, stretching across the space, represents the “time” that has passed from then to now, as well as the “lives and activities of people” that have accumulated in this place, bringing them together as a single form of “distance.” The telescope thus functions as a kind of time-travel device, allowing the viewer to observe the past from the present.

For this exhibition, I have tried to intervene as little as possible in the things that already existed at the site.

The bundle of bamboo in the center of the first floor is one such element.

The shop is no longer in operation, and no one lives in the building. Yet in its courtyard, bamboo continues to grow vigorously. Cut bamboo is left casually in the space, without even being placed into garbage bags.

Walking through Osu, I sometimes encounter spaces with an atmosphere that is difficult to put into words. A coin-operated parking lot appears within the grounds of a temple. There are places that can only be reached by passing through someone’s property. Old and new buildings stand tightly beside one another, as if confronting each other.

In my own installation practice, I have often found myself placing artworks and dismantled fixtures both inside and outside my home, where they seem to contend for space with one another. Somehow, these objects create an indescribable and delicate “in-between” space.

I felt a similar quality in the bamboo and the space that had emerged around it at this site. Although this is a stranger’s house, a place where I have never lived, I felt as though it was filled with a peculiar sense of comfort and familiarity.

On the second floor, I installed a fixed-point camera using a handheld video camera.

Compared with the first floor, the second floor has a weaker sense of human presence, and at first glance, it seems as though time itself has stopped.

Yet when the viewer looks through the telescope, what appears is the “landscape of now” displayed on the LCD screen of the handheld camera, together with a time display marking the passing of each second.

Here, the viewer observes the “present”—something that could not be consciously perceived on the first floor.

The act of “observing the present” is an attempt to make us recognize once again the existence of the time in which we are living, a time that can easily be forgotten when we do not consciously attend to it.

Time continues to flow even at this very moment. Each passing second, too, accumulates here, becoming part of the history of this place.

The history of Osu, which has continued from the past into the present, does not exist only in what has already passed. The time in which we are living now is also accumulating as part of that history.

In this work, I have sought to avoid imposing judgments or emotions of affirmation and denial toward what might conventionally be regarded as “old” and “new.”

What can be seen. What cannot be seen.

What once existed. What exists here now.

Through the act of observing the distances and time that exist between these things, I hope to gain a deeper understanding of the lives and activities that have accumulated in this place called Osu, as well as the landscape that exists here today.