TITLE: The Void Shaper - Beyond the Landscape: Its End and Rebirth - 「Proof of Existence and Disappearance」

Dry the water and line up the stones.
This series explores the interplay of existence and disappearance,
within an attempt to reconstruct the concept of Karesansui (dry landscape) through photography.
It draws inspiration from the spatial expression of Tōhaku Hasegawa (1539–1610), who once painted disappearing pines.

Photography is typically understood as a medium that captures “existence.”
However, this work depicts the process of disappearance by photographing rocks repeatedly engulfed by waves through long exposure.
The objects lose their function and meaning, returning to a state of simply being.
The waves and rocks, swallowed by the flow of time, nevertheless persist in their attempt to remain.

As the waves and rocks blur their outlines, disappearance itself begins to take shape.
The object no longer exists here in a fixed sense, but rather, remains while vanishing.
What is captured here is the very “space” where the only absolute—mass—is destabilized, and where existence and disappearance wander in-between.

Something that was rock, and something that has lost its meaning as rock.
I seek to purify the object, stripping away the weight of meaning.
The weight of meaning is the weight of existence.
So then, what is left?

The Void Shaper is an ontological deconstruction.
If, as Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) claimed, "existence precedes essence,"
then when essence disappears,
can we still say that existence remains?

When landscape ceases to be landscape,
what, then, is left?

AUTHOR: katsuhide motoi (Japan)