Squares

aaploit presents Squares, a solo exhibition by Kamui Koreaki, on view from June 7 through June 23, 2024. Kamui focuses on playground equipment in parks—spaces created as part of Japan's modernization effort to build physical fitness, furnished with equipment imported for that purpose. He photographs these structures standing in parks at night. The stillness of his images, in which the daytime noise is unimaginable, draws the viewer in.

The playground equipment Kamui captures through his distinctive perspective occupies a world of monochrome. In the silence of stopped time, the structures glow in the darkness like apparitions that have stepped out of a dream. His camera blurs the boundary between reality and unreality, inviting the viewer into a dreamlike space. Parks show different faces by day and by night; it is in the dark that the equipment reveals a new presence.

The equipment functions as solitary beings. Looking at them alone, a sense of loneliness spreads through the mind, yet there are moments when the playfulness and creativity inherent in these structures bring renewed vitality. Kamui's work explores this dialogue between solitude and play.

Encountering Cosmic Solitude — For the Photographs of Kamui Koreaki

Shigeo Goto (Professor, Kyoto University of the Arts)

It goes without saying: photography today is neither a means of proving truth nor of self-expression. It is a device for surveying and transforming the time-space in which we live. Many photographers still cannot engage in this "meta-thinking" about photography; they remain in old visual play, unaware that photography stands at the entrance to the metaverse. Some, fearing the journey, turn back toward old photographs.

Kamui Koreaki is an artist who has realized that the apparatus of photography can lead to another dimension of world-cognition. During the pandemic, he went alone to deserted parks at night and continued to photograph playground equipment. It was a purposeless, meaningless, socially deviant, "suspicious" journey. The playground equipment he photographed may originally have been state apparatuses for national fitness, but such original meanings have long since dissipated from these objects. Looking at Kamui's photographs, it seems that what he ultimately surveyed, contacted, and encountered was "cosmic solitude"—the fact that every place and every thing shares equally in the isolation of the universe.

For contemporary photography to shift into art, both horizontal and vertical journeys are necessary. The horizontal is connection to the context of contemporary art; the vertical is a journey of existence and cognition. The midnight photographic ritual transformed Kamui. Hang his photographs on your wall. They are windows inviting you on a journey into cosmic solitude.

For inquiries regarding the exhibition and works, please contact info@aaploit.com.