Alberto Giacometti is a sculptor known for his elongated human figures. He believed that his sculptures should be made under the same principles, regardless of their size. Every one of his sculptures undergoes a remarkable transformation depending on the light.
Giacometti’s Paris studio, described as a "nest," was overflowing with plaster debris that narrated the arduous struggle of making. He would create a sculpture and then destroy it in an endless cycle of working and re-working.
Photographer Ernst Scheidegger (1923–2016), who captured Giacometti and his work for over twenty years, spoke of the "play of light" within his plaster sculptures. For Scheidegger, documenting these sculptures as they shifted in the changing light was a source of profound joy.
The words of this photographer, who observed the sculptor and his work for so many years, hold clues that draw us closer to the very heart of creation. If presence is something that transcends verbal explanation, and is instead something that moves and shifts according to the light, then perhaps that "manifestation of light" dwelling within the trembling sculptures was the vivid instant that signaled to Giacometti that he had momentarily reached the end of his work.

In this section, we present Momo Yamanashi’s works in the same space as Giacometti’s. These photographs, characterized by a soft, diffused glow, were taken in Nepal using a simple pinhole camera that Yamanashi made herself. A small hole made in the camera box captures the light and binds it to the film inside, producing a soft texture that is distinct from the sharpness of a digital image. The inspiration for this body of work came from the numerous caves in Nepal, which evoked associations with pinhole cameras for the artist.
Yamanishi studied metal casting in university. When she discovered an ammonite fossil in Nepal, she intuitively understood it as a “cast of time." The millions of years of natural processes required to produce a fossil resonate with the principles of metal casting, in which molten metal takes on a specific form within a mold. In much the same way, the photographic process, in which light enters a box and forms an image inside, overlaps with these same principles of casting.
A fossil is a living thing that has been transformed into stone; it is essentially different from the ammonite it once was. Likewise, a photograph—a cast of light—is a transformed image that has been created through the effects of time.

A young man holds a twin-lens reflex camera, gazing at his own reflection in the mirror. Shuntaro Tanikawa, who would make his debut in 1952 with the poetry collection Two Billion Light Years of Solitude, was nineteen years old at the time. In addition to his poetry, Tanikawa was deeply engrossed in photography during this period.
Friend and poet Makoto Ōoka described Tanikawa’s early poems as “a solitary, yet luminous gaze,” an assessment that could be applied to Tanikawa’s photographs as well.
Alongside poetry and photography, Tanikawa dedicated himself to building radios in his late teens, and would go on to become an avid collector of vintage radios from the West. Throughout his life, Tanikawa remained captivated by the magnetic allure of the radio and its power to transport people into a world of imagination.
When asked what motivated him to write poetry, Tanikawa replied, "Because I want to play with the world—that is, with words." For him, poetry, photography, and his "sound boxes" were all devices to bring the world into focus, and each one was deeply connected to the moment when words emerge. In this section of the exhibition, we follow the poet’s younger days of creation and imagination through his photographs, poems, and his radio collection.

In the middle of winter, temperatures in the village of Otoineppu in Hokkaido fall to minus thirty degrees Celsius. Nature can feel extraordinarily close when layers of silver snow envelop the world in a penetrating silence.
Bikky Sunazawa turned an abandoned elementary school in this area into a home studio where he brought forth forms through a process akin to fiercely wrestling with the massive trees used in his work. Created through an engagement with a robust “body” that once contained life and its resistance to the chisel, these forms house a faint sense of the sacred.
Sunazawa spoke of art residing within nature, and likewise, of nature residing within art. For this reason, he did not mind if his wood carvings decayed as a result of exposure to wind and snow. Though its physical form may change amidst the relentless cycle of nature, his work is brimming with an unwavering presence.
For Sunazawa, creating sculptures out of wood was a way for him to eliminate the distance between himself and nature. This fierce determination is still evident to this day in the marks of his chisel.

In this section, "reading" is understood as an act of engaging with the world through imagination and the body. Elena Tutatchikova expresses thought, imagination, and bodily experience as a single, continuous process.
Walking is one of the essential starting points in her creative practice. As movement opens pathways for thought and a layered sense of time begins to emerge, her movement through the outside world and the quiet hours spent in the studio flow into one another, forming a single rhythm.
In her recent ceramic works, the changing materiality of clay and the layers of color created through glaze take shape, embodying the ongoing circulation between body and thought, and emerge as a tactile encounter with the world.
This installation brings together the new ceramic sculpture series Islands, reliefs, paintings, and drawings, inviting viewers into an experience akin to tracing a map of the imagination.