It all began with an image, before words: the monochrome of a red body inside a red box.

AKA follows a butoh dancer through seven transformations. The film explores the passages from one inner state to another, when emotion becomes matter, movement, and presence.

Born in Japan in the late 1950s, butoh seeks a body stripped of learned gestures, a body crossed by states rather than characters. Here the transformation is built into the film itself: at each stage, a layer of the set disappears and the space tightens, while the body carries a new intensity.

Three cameras record different presences of the body at once: the whole of it, a fragment of skin, and a vertical overhead view where the figure seems to detach from itself. These different gazes build a mental space where the body becomes the visible site of an inner transformation.

There are no words in the film, only music and dance. Together, movement, sound, and camera compose a language that precedes words, favouring sensation over interpretation.

The film never names its states. It simply invites you to move through them.

Surfaces grew out of my encounter with the Japanese notions of honne and tatemae, which name, depending on the context, what belongs to the intimate self and what is presented to the world. More than an opposition between a "true" and a "false" face, they led me to ask what plays out at the surface of a person: the space where identity is built, transformed, and made visible.

Living in Tokyo, I was struck by the place the face holds in many Japanese art forms. Geisha makeup, Noh masks, butoh: they do not tell the same story, but each turns the face into a site of transformation rather than a simple mirror of the inner self. The mask does not necessarily erase identity; it produces it, shifts it, or makes it perceptible in another way. I wanted the faces in this series to work like that: worn like masks, sometimes to the point of exaggeration.

Butoh imposed itself naturally. With its bodies crossed by states rather than characters, it offered a language where the surface of the body becomes a site of metamorphosis. Surfaces was made in Tokyo with Dai Matsuoka and Akihito Ichihara, dancers of the Sankai Juku company. I had discovered them on stage in Paris before moving to Japan; working with them became one of the starting points of the project.

The images follow a transformation: first whitened bodies whose faces seem to fade, then a face appears, before water runs through the series as a material of passage.

Some of the photographs are made in redscale, the film loaded in reverse so that each image is exposed through its own back. The process echoes what runs through the whole series: two faces of the same material, one visible, one hidden. The film does not reveal a hidden truth; it shows that every image already holds several faces. Perhaps our own faces do too.

A woman waits out the rain under an umbrella, sunglasses on. A horse stands in a garden like an apparition.

For years, travelling, I have photographed moments like these, where something resists. A scene looks familiar, then a detail shifts it. What seems obvious stops being so.

The series is built in diptychs, or sometimes around a single image. What binds them is not a story but a tension: a space where several readings can coexist without one erasing the other.

Nearly all of these photographs were made on islands. I neither name nor locate them. The island is not the subject of the series; it is its condition. Surrounded by water, it holds a fragile balance, separate without being isolated.

The people who appear in these images stay mostly anonymous, sometimes seen from behind, sometimes out of frame. They pass through the photographs more than they inhabit them. Like the places they occupy, they escape any stable definition.

I saw Lin Syouki's work before I fully understood it. That resistance convinced me it had to be shown.

His paintings do not reveal themselves from a fixed position. Their iridescent surface shifts as the gaze moves, bringing out a different image from every point of view. Several presences coexist within a single work. Stand still and the painting seems to close. Step aside and it opens again.

What drew me to his work is this way of turning looking into a physical experience. The image is not only in front of us: it is built in the encounter between the work and the one who looks at it.

Designing this exhibition was therefore not simply a matter of placing works in a space, but of creating the conditions for an encounter. The hang, the distances, and the spaces between the paintings were conceived to invite the viewer to slow down, to move, and to become part of the image.

My time in Japan also attuned me to a sense of space where the interval, silence, and emptiness can fully take part in an experience. The exhibition was conceived in that spirit: giving the works the space they need to appear.

Shape of Light was Lin Syouki's first solo exhibition.