What Tsutsumi Asano photographs is photographs. She casts light into a model she has built herself, and shoots. She prints the photograph. She casts light onto the print, and shoots again. She prints again. In progress (2023–) has continued as the repetition of this simple procedure. For three years, photography has taken photography as its only subject.
The repetition does two things at once. With each pass, a new image is generated. At the same time, details that were once there blow out to white and cannot be seen. Gaining something and losing something are not separate events. Accumulation and erasure occur within the same act. A single exposure performs both. So the surface of In progress loosens with each generation; the contours slacken, the geometry bleeds. The process of an image disappearing is shown as a process of light growing brighter. This is a strange condition.
Where the image burned out
In Exposed and Reappear (2025), Tsutsumi lit the blown-out, unseeable areas from behind. The image came up. This is not a matter of technical ingenuity. It means that the image had not disappeared. The print had been holding those supposedly lost details all along, in a state where they could not be shown. What vanished was not the image but the condition under which the image could be seen. Photographic repetition is understood as degradation: a copy of a copy loses information of some kind. But Tsutsumi's white-out was not the annihilation of information. It was a transition into a state where the information could not be read out. Change the way the light falls, and the image comes back. This discovery reorganizes the meaning of her practice as a whole. In progress is not a record of an image wearing away. It is an apparatus in which the image travels between being visible and being invisible.
The discovery had a precedent. In Reframing 'In progress' (2024), several prints are stacked at different heights inside a deep frame. Onto the light and shadow burned into the image, the light and shadow of the actual room fall. As you look, you can no longer tell which light is which. The boundary between the light inside the photograph and the light falling on the photograph had blurred. Once that happened, the move of bringing the image back by casting light onto the print was one step away. In Shadows and Spaces Reappearing I, II, III (2025), the shadows produced by the previous exhibition are captured and set back into the places they came from; where the works had hung becomes visible as a slightly protruding margin. Absence acquires physical thickness. In Reflections (2026), reflections through acrylic cause the space of the image and the space of the room to intersect.
Unselected images
Then the new work, Unselected Images I, II, III (2026), whose title says everything. The images that were not chosen.
As long as the work continues, the images keep multiplying. She photographs, prints, and from among the prints chooses the one to photograph next. What is chosen advances to the next generation; what is not chosen stays where it is. Three years of accumulation now sit in the artist's studio as a single chosen lineage and an enormous sediment of the unchosen.
Unselected Images photographs that sediment. Hundreds of prints appear in the picture. They curl, overlap, cover one another, cast shadows across one another. Within a single print, a smaller accumulation appears. A print in the foreground hides a print behind it, and you can tell that the same thing is happening back there too.
And in this exhibition, the process of selection itself is presented as a moving-image work. The artist's hand moves, one sheet is picked up, the others are left.
You watch, and you cannot tell. The difference between what was chosen and what was not is minute. Set side by side, they give no reason why that one was taken. Watching the artist's hands, no grounds appear.
That the grounds cannot be seen is what this work presents. If the difference were obvious, it would become a question of judgment: this composition is better, this tonality richer. It would become a question of skill and eye. But if the difference cannot be told apart, selection loses its grounds. And still it was chosen. Because it was chosen, it is framed, and it hangs on a wall. To photograph something is to confer importance on it. What is photographed stands somewhere other than what is not. Choosing is what makes it a work. Tsutsumi lays that circuit bare. Rather than concealing the arbitrariness of selection, she presents it. And even presented, it still cannot be seen. She shows us that showing does not make it visible.
Selection is not a sufficient word. Selection leaves what was not chosen as it was. But in Tsutsumi's procedure, the moment one sheet is chosen, the rest change status: they become the ones that might be chosen next. Taking something out remakes the whole that remains after it has been taken out. What happens here is not selection but extraction. And extraction always produces a residue. The residue becomes the matrix that waits for the next extraction. This procedure therefore prepares its own next stage.
You cannot tell how large it is
Looking at Unselected Images, you lose the sense of scale. It could be a huge installation covering a wall. It could be working prints scattered across a desk. And yet the work as exhibited is a small print in a box frame. This is neither illusion nor failure. It is what photography always does.
Sculpture is constituted by its ratio to the body; the size of a large work reaches you as a bodily sensation when you stand before it. In painting, the dimensions of the surface are part of the experience of looking. But a photograph does not possess the scale of what is in it. It possesses the size of the paper; the size of the subject is lost. And because it is lost, photography could place anything beside anything else. A wall-sized painting and a craft object that fits in the palm can be set on the same page at the same size. Stripping scale is what made juxtaposition possible, and comparison possible. Losing was the condition for knowing.
Tsutsumi's procedure repeats this dilution inside the work, again and again. Light is cast into a model (small); the light is photographed (scale is lost); it becomes a print (a new dimension is assigned); the accumulation is photographed (lost again); it is printed (assigned again). For three years, this back-and-forth has continued. But in Tsutsumi's work, dilution does not make comparison possible; the opposite happens. The chosen sheet and the unchosen sheet come out of the same procedure, are stripped of dimension in the same way, and sit on the same paper. They can be juxtaposed. But comparison does not take place. The capacity photography was supposed to have gained by stripping scale spins here without traction. What looked enormous fits in the palm of a hand.
The next layer
In Tsutsumi Asano's solo exhibition In progress - Unfolded, works from 2023 to the present (2026) are gathered in a single space for the first time. But this is not a retrospective. During the run, the light of the gallery will fall on the exhibited works and cast shadows. These will be photographed and taken into the next production. What erased the image, what brought the image back, and what generates the next layer is light. The exhibition is not the presentation of a completed state; it is an accumulation of material for the next layer. The exhibition becomes not an endpoint but the starting point of the next exhibition. Tsutsumi implements that structure in the generative procedure of the work itself. Exhibiting has become part of making. This is why In progress does not end. It is not that the artist declines to end it. It is that extraction keeps generating the conditions for its own next step.
As the work is repeated, the details blur. From the image, you can no longer read what was photographed. Even so, the viewer tries to assign a motif. Faced with something that cannot be read out, one decides something anyway. There is a selection there, not unlike what the artist does in choosing a single sheet. And when you stand in the gallery, look at the works, and, most likely, take a photograph, you too have been taken into the next layer.