“However much you try to explain a “river” by scooping water into your hands, the water is gone in an instant. So I stopped trying to explain the river through the water I had scooped up, and looked instead at the water itself.
I realized that the river flowing before my eyes was simply a river.” Shinya Masuda
“In our last interview, I spoke about my background and the HANAFUDA SHOUZOKU series. Since then, I presented a new series, HOJO ZANMAI, in Tokyo in January 2025 and in Kuala Lumpur that May. I’d like to tell you a little about what happened in between, and where my work stands now.
In HANAFUDA SHOUZOKU, I returned again and again to memory, emotion, and Japanese culture. Through this process, I felt that I had succeeded in photographing the moment when the love of my grandmother and mother became something I could preserve as a record, and in bringing customs and rituals into the work itself.
For a while, I was satisfied with that.
But the global events of 2020 shook something loose in me. I suddenly found myself unable to take anything for granted, and felt compelled to look at the world again with my own eyes. I set out on a journey of exploration, guided by the thought that all things of form eventually cease to exist.
That journey led me to a much larger question.
Form is lost. And so we say farewell to what is lost, while recording the love that remains.
In that sense, the impermanence at the heart of HANAFUDA SHOUZOKU may have carried something of the feeling of mourning the dead.
But in HOJO ZANMAI, although impermanence was still the starting point, there was nothing left to record.
The question became:
What is existence, in the first place?
And how do you turn something invisible, something formless, into an image?
I felt I needed to work through the old scriptures and sutras left behind by ancient people—texts concerned with things whose very existence is uncertain. At the same time, I felt compelled to study contemporary science, including the latest cosmology.
Drawn to these ancient texts, I began asking questions that seemed to transcend time:
Where do we come from?
Why are we here?
What is the universe?
What is love?
My studio—a modest room about three meters square—was roughly the size of a hojo, the small hut in which Japanese hermits and thinkers once withdrew for contemplation. They called such a deep state of meditation zanmai.
Immersed in ancient scriptures, Buddhist thought, and modern cosmology, I found myself assembling fragments of ancient insight like pieces of a puzzle. At times, it felt as though a bridge were emerging between past and future, and between the visible and the unseen. I was deeply moved whenever I discovered a resonance between ancient wisdom and contemporary science.
I named the work HOJO ZANMAI. At the time, I called this exploration of the invisible world “Visual Metaphysics.”
HOJO ZANMAI was an attempt to explore, through visual art, the relationship between the invisible—the metaphysical—and the physical world of phenomena.
It was also a contemplative space: a quiet invitation to sense the outer universe and the inner universe at the same time.
Something like a host offering tea.
And since then, something has gradually changed. Rather than searching for answers, I’ve continued to make work as a way of observing—to see how perception itself arises.
Here are a couple of things I’ve encountered along the way.
People draw lines between stars,
give them names,
and give them meaning.
Did the stars have meaning from the beginning?
Perhaps not.
Meaning may not be there to begin with. It arises in the encounter with the one who sees.
And another day—
However much you try to explain a “river” by scooping water into your hands, the water is gone in an instant.
So I stopped trying to explain the river through the water I had scooped up, and looked instead at the water itself.
I realized that the river flowing before my eyes was simply a river.
Day after day, I look at works that appear and disappear.
I have come to realize that meaning does not reside in the work itself.
I am observing the moment when perception—and meaning—arises.
That is where my work stands today.” Shinya Masud
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HANAFUDA SHOUZOKU
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Gorgeous work!
This work exists entirely in its own world. Each one of these images is extraordinary,