Artist Statement: Ryuji
My artistic origin lies in the tears I shed on the coastline of the disaster zone, six months after the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011. Looking down from the heights, the homes that once stood there had vanished. Only exposed foundations and roads lay bare—an explicit manifestation of "Absence." Standing before that void, an indescribable emotion surged from within me. That was the moment my quest for "recording" began.
For over twenty years, working as a nurse in geriatric facilities and chronic care hospitals, I have witnessed hundreds of "completions of life." In the clinical field, I observed the brutal binary choice thrust upon humans at the moment of death: a "fulfilled completion of life," departing with a sense of completion surrounded by love, or a "lonely completion of life," arriving in a moment when no one is watching. The manner of one's end vividly illuminates the life they have walked until that point.
I translate this clinical gaze into photography, using the camera as a measuring instrument to confront the world. My proposed "Theory of Absence" is not a record of nihilism. It is an attempt to fixate the "index of contact"—where light, as physical energy, touches matter—and to anchor fading subjects into the geological strata of memory as "Saturated Absence."
My photographs are not completed answers. They are "primers" designed to draw out the memories and vital impulses dormant within the viewer. When the presented fragments of absence interfere with the viewer's personal memory and spread like ripples, a truth unique to being human is finally dredged up from a world overflowing with mere information.
To resist the sea of oblivion known as loneliness, and to record the "weight of absence" in the world as it exists here and now. For me, having gazed upon countless lives and deaths, this is the most sincere resistance against the world, and my record of compassion.