One Note of The Shadow
Text: Riho Matsue
Translator: Perera Shereen

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Many years ago, I was invited to a gathering and ended up at a house of a stranger. It was there in a room,
on a table, a single ower was in bloom in a vase. It was a branch of a cherry blossom. I tried to take myiPhone out of my pocket to take a photo, when a person in the room called out to me, “Seems like someone
broke off that branch willfully, it’s not really something they should have done, so you probably shouldn’t takea photo”. I can’t recall the face or name of those people from that day, but in my iPhone, there remains not a
photo of the branch itself, but a shadow of it.
A branch of a cherry blossom is indeed a cherry blossom, but the shadow of one was not cherry blossom
itself (that’s why I was allowed to take a photo of it). In that way, the ‘shadow’ shows evidence of what was -or
what was not- present. But it does not and cannot equate to the object in of itself. The photograph of theshadow obscured the characteristic outlines of the branch. Therefore, stimulating my imagination, leading tothoughts such as perhaps that cherry blossom was an arti cial ower or other kind of ower. In that sense,
shadows wander, or exist separately from reality itself.
***********************************************************************************************************Sorry for the long preamble, Kage wo shitatameru (notes of shadows) showcases the works of two artists,
Satoshi Kikuya and Kasumi Maeda, and hopes to ‘illuminate’ their two works related to shadows. Kikuya'swork occupies the space on the 1st oor of the exhibition venue. Based on familiar documentary photos andvideos left on the iPhone, he has created two-dimensional works and animations that mix pop art, modern
Western paintings, and illustrations while interweaving fact and ction. Many of his works use shadows as
secondary by-products of the real world, such as recorded landscapes and circulating images. 22.7×15.8cm
works lined up on the walls of this room have the word esquisse in their titles and so we can understand them
to be sketches for other works. Although there are individual themes such as camping and running, all of themwere inspired by Kikuya's memories, and were improvised and continuously produced as he came up withthem. In addition, the eye-catching LED work "Lightning Dog (Jake)" is a work with a motif of a dog and aperson that literally emit light, and it can be connected to the dog gure seen in the works of the esquisse
series.
The exhibition space on the 2nd oor is mainly composed of Maeda's new works. Starting with her sense of
inadequacy and dissatisfaction with the materiality of her own body, she has produced video works and threedimensional works that record her behavior. Lined up in the center of the exhibition room, ‘The way to move ahill’ is an armrest-like iron tool and monitor made to match the size of Maeda's body. This is an installation
work composed of the written instructions to record Maeda's performance. The numbers and names of bodyparts written on the instruction plate correspond to the movements in the video, and although it is possible toroughly imagine the ow of the performance. But the very close-up footage makes it dif cult to understand thewhole artist’s actual movement. The screen simply shows the realistic texture of the skin, and it recalls theexistence of Maeda who once touched the tool. But it seems there is a gap between the partial vivid image ofthe skin on a screen and the actual artist’s body. This creates a similar impression as ‘vis-a-vis’ in front of theexhibition room. This video work in which Maeda hides her face with the palm of her hand and the camera
follows her. In this work, the image of a palm that continues to be projected in the center of the screen
gradually unravels, leaves Maeda's unique body, and appears to transform into something else like a oatingshadow.
Prior to that, Maeda had approached the materiality of her own body in a variety of ways, but her previous
work often used her projectors and mirrors. “The Distant Body” exhibited on the 3rd oor is a video work.
Maeda's gure that she was stroking her own leg is projected onto a screen. Then actually she also appears,
but her body is partitioned off by a screen and she tries to ll in her misaligned contours of the body in aninconvenient state with clay. In addition, “Dancing on the Wall #3,” #4, and #6 use both the right and left hands
to draw the outlines of one's own body re ected in the mirror and layer them on two acrylic boards and thelines are replaced with stone powder clay. Both works include a process of understanding/reclaiming her true
sense while measuring the distance between her own awkward body. When Maeda thinks about her body,there is simultaneously a lightness that tries to push her away from herself and a weight that pulls her towards
her.
And on display in the back of the 3rd oor is Kikuya's video work ’Nodebook animated 1’. If you look at thisvideo, you will notice that all the works in front of the 1st and 3rd oors are parts that appear in the animation.
At the time of his solo exhibition held in Kanazawa, one commented, "[Kikutani's work] separates the
background [world] from the motif [world], creating a unique world as if the motif were oating." If we borrowthe term ‘ oating image’, the fragments used in the animation production process but separated from theanimated works (esquisse, time-lapse parts, LED works, etc.) are also a ‘ oating image’ and can beconsidered to overlap with the properties of shadows. This animation itself is a gradual montage based on
memories and inexperienced images such as photos and records left on his smartphone, and his own
memories. What is here is a sense of oating, traveling back and forth in time, like dogs snif ng out thelingering scents of the past and signs of future rain.
The philosopher Plato once said, "Those who are bound and stare at the wall see only shadows and takethem for real." These recorded things and insubstantial images, their fragments and traces are patched
together and montaged in memory, and it looks like a story from the present point of view. Like historicalrevisionists, it may sometimes be a mistake to assume that this alone is true. However, the shadows andtraces of the trivial past give us a sense of reality for a moment and have a great potential to drive ourimagination. Like Kikuya and Maeda, I believe that with the practice of Kage wo shitatameru (note ofshadows) under your own feet can allow you too to come back to this moment someday and rethink,reconsider and relearn something.

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I still have a photo of that shadow branch on my iPhone.
All I can recall now is that that ower was there.
But sometimes such things lead to the present.