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Wakasugi’s works are forever evolving and it is difficult to tell whether they are photographs or illusions. They present scenes that do not exist in reality but evoke nostalgia or depict a universe we would all like to see. In his most outstanding work, he used photographs of nature that he had taken in remote regions of the world to decorate the sliding paper doors of a traditional, four-hundred-year-old Japanese building, thereby combining mutually exclusive elements—interior and exterior, light and dark, stillness and motion, film and digital, past and present.

In this, his second New York exhibition, he will show photographs of Madonna that he took for a magazine when she first visited Japan in 1985. Madonna’s well-toned body, her face, her coquettish vitality— thirty six years have passed since she released her hit  song, “Material Girl,” the sound and rhythm of which embodies materialism.　I wonder what the challenging gaze of this eighties icon has to say to us today. 

In the same way that Wakasugi’s recent work in mixed media surpasses the barriers of time and space, it leads to fusion and explosion, before finally giving birth to a transformation. The subsequent reaction that occurs between these most beautiful things will doubtless reveal an unknown world. 

-Shoko Aono