Daisuke Yokota: The photographer of hallucinations

By Jean-Kenta Gauthier.

Published on 25 August 2021. Updated on 11 September 2026.

Daisuke Yokota first began out in music earlier than turning to visible artwork. For over a decade, the Japanese photographer has developed a novel aesthetic of layers, strata and superimpositions. He usually invokes sound, referring to the composer Aphex Twin and asks: What can be the equal of sound reverberation in {a photograph}? How can time be included in a nonetheless picture? In 2015, he composed Inversion, a big set of solarized pictures utilizing the recto-verso superimposition of pages from artists’ books which he printed on translucent paper (Matter Waxed, 2014–15). This superimposition of usually figurative pictures triggered a seemingly summary consequence. These photos act as intertwined private reminiscences arising within the current to confuse our studying of the previous.

From figuration to summary pictures

While Yokota’s early works, like Back Yard (2012), Site/ Cloud (2013) and Corpus (2014), nonetheless contained figurative pictures of our bodies, landscapes, structure, he began to interrupt the affiliation between the medium, or photographic materials, and the transcribed picture. The photographer strongly rejected the precept of the photographic index.

The collection Color Photographs (2015), Matter (2016), Scum (2018), Dregs (2018), Sediment (2019), and Untitled (2020), are like phases in a journey by means of technical variations on the identical theme. Photography turns into a topic by itself, exhibiting what it’s moderately than what it represents. Untitled is important on this respect. The object now not refers to something and doesn’t even want a title, as if identification with the world had been definitively revoked.

Abstraction as a method to seize time

In 2016, Daisuke Yokota created Mortuary, which options gigantic rolls of developed and glued photosensitive paper exhibiting the hint of the chemistry used. A soundtrack of muffled vibrations accompanies the art work. Nonetheless, this immersive set up referred to a real-life occasion. As a toddler, Yokota suffered from feverish assaults that brought on intense hallucinations. Mortuary evoked this buried reminiscence. Abstraction has a perform in Yokota’s work: “A photograph without the intervention of human perception is just a material, but when a human being sees it and thinks about it at a certain time and place, the photograph becomes an interesting phenomenon. To think about photography is to think about humans being themselves.”

In preparation for Room. Pt. 1, proven in Spring 2016 on the Guardian Garden house in Tokyo, Yokota remoted himself for 2 months in varied love resorts in Tachikawa, close to his residence within the Tokyo Prefecture, as if he was operating away from it. Although he had been utilizing journey as an expert context for a decade, he had by no means earlier than “travelled” by means of his personal metropolis. During these two months, he strove to keep up a traveller’s sense of distance. He skilled his resort rooms as ephemeral time capsules that allowed him to achieve previous reminiscences and new psychological and bodily areas.

“When you go to a love hotel alone. You don’t need to think about what’s going to happen next, because your goal is to ‘just be there, and when your time is up, you can just leave. When you are in such a meaningless moment, unexpected memories are sometimes evoked, as if you were dreaming, and although you are conscious, you seem to be somewhere else,” the photographer defined.

Isolation as a method to attain new areas

These resort rooms are similar to caves into which the skin world invitations itself abruptly. “In a cave, the image of light coming through a hole into the dark space is like a hallucination, isn’t it? The image that is projected there is of the outside world, but it is not the outside itself. The viewer only imagines the outside world from there. For me, the act of being in one place and fantasizing about others is very photographic. In this sense, I see the Love Hotel as a modern-day cave, and the space itself overlaps with the metaphor of the camera obscura,” Daisuke Yokota shared.

In Room. Pt. 1, he piled up pictures, movies and sculptures, the superimposition of layers of pictures evoking the best way during which the previous invitations itself into the current, when one second evokes one other, when one place summons up one other. There is a parallel between the photographer’s must withdraw from the world for 2 months, to take away himself from the contingencies of on a regular basis life, and his refusal of the ability of identification with the world usually granted to pictures.

“Basically, I think it doesn’t matter where the light is projected, and I think it doesn’t matter what is there, even if there are people, as long as there is a place where the light can adhere.” Daisuke Yokota lives in Tokyo, however in the end that doesn’t matter. By eradicating himself from the world, he’s at residence all over the place. This is how he sees gentle – a lesson for pictures, and for all of us who’ve lived in isolation over so many latest months.