Where the Shadow Resides is a photographic and installation series in which I photograph trees associated with personal memories and local narratives at twilight.

The Japanese word for twilight, tasogare, was once written as 誰そ彼, meaning “Who is that?”—a reference to the hour when the figure of a person standing before us becomes difficult to distinguish. In photography and film, the brief period of roughly fifteen minutes after sunset is often called the “magic hour.” During this transition from day to night, the outlines of things grow indistinct, and familiar landscapes take on an unfamiliar appearance. Twilight has also long been regarded as a time when the boundary between this world and Tokoyo—the eternal realm beyond—grows permeable, allowing different times and forms of existence to overlap.

In this series, twilight is not used merely as an aesthetic effect. It is a condition through which the boundaries between present and past, presence and absence, are temporarily unsettled, allowing normally unnoticed layers of time and traces of presence to emerge from within the landscape.

In recent works, I have transferred these images onto locally produced textiles, hanging scrolls, and temple curtains, bringing them into relation with the history and architecture of each site, as well as with light, wind, and the human body. Rather than treating photography as a means of documentation, I use it as a medium for transforming the perception of a place and creating a work specific to that site.