ABSCURA / LILY NIGHT

The work "ABSCURA" by Lily Night, the title of which is a combination of "abstract" and "obscura". It is also the origin of the artist's thinking and creation. The work is inspired by photographs taken during a three-day visit by her parents (_intimate others) from China to the apartment where she was living alone in Tokyo. A body that enters a space. Or an act that seems to unlash the body as a space. The images that emerge from these actions make us perceive the nodes of memory that have left the story of "family" and the time that is being multilayered. And there are also expressed the paradox of nesting, the spatial perspective that tries to receive what is unseen outside the frame. "ABSCURA" is a representation of a new dark box of photography that looks at interconnected individual life and society. "Lily talks about the act of photography as below: Just as the act of breathing has an effect on our minds, just as the contraction and expansion of our lungs are biologically linked to how we sense things, I attempt to express through photographs the relationship between the times and spaces I've lived through, and the past and present environments in which I find myself. By capturing parts of our bodies or of natural phenomena, I've tried to invert that relationship. You could say she's trying to visualize her formative values or her link to the world through photography, as she explores the realm of her unconsciousness. Disentangling her relationships with family, blurring the outline of her existence, she observes, selects and rearranges the images as with the gaze of an outsider. Then she entrusts these fragments of her existence to others, and sends them out to somewhere far off and unfamiliar to be a part of the larger world, to be a part of our common ground. Lily's camera obscura leads us to the eternal tension between subjectivity and universality: each one of us has a unique perspective, yet we are only infinitesimal fractions of reality. We are replaceable and unreplaceable, and yet we have to confront our domestic and social links to the world." "Abstract Necessity" Harumi Niwa Curator (Photography), Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo Book Design____ ______ Size_ H297mm _ W210mm Page_122 pages Binding_Softcover Published in Feb 2022 ISBN_978-4-86541-140-9