Yasuaki Matsuura

Lives and works in Tokyo, Japan

Artist statement

I spent more than a decade designing cameras to make recording smoother. Now I make sculptures that put friction back into it. As recording expanded beyond the camera, images became increasingly sorted, selected, and resurfaced by platforms and AI. The convenience is real, but so is the delegation: part of the work of remembering is being handed over to systems we rarely see. I bring those invisible processes back into the room. Cameras, mirrors, and optical instruments become sculptural devices that appear credible as tools but behave otherwise. Viewers look through them, move closer, keep their distance, encounter misaligned images, or face devices that refuse to record at all. My background in industrial camera design is not incidental to this work; it is its method. I spent years helping remove failure, hesitation, waiting time, and the awkwardness of the body from recording. I now use those conditions as material. The works retain the precision and visual logic of manufactured products, establishing an expectation of function that they then frustrate, reverse, or withhold. These interruptions make the acts of seeing, choosing, being seen, and remembering perceptible again. I call this active memory: not the effortless retrieval of a stored past, but something made through attention, bodily action, uncertainty, and encounters with others. If technology increasingly remembers for us, my work asks what remains ours to remember.

Artwork