REAL≒UNREAL

This exhibition brings together Masaharu Sato’s works from his early pieces produced during his time in Germany to those from his later years, combining moving image works and two-dimensional pieces.

Sato was an artist who moved across the fields of contemporary art, film, animation, and media art, while continually observing the uncertainty latent in everyday scenes. Through the technique of rotoscoping, in which footage shot with a video camera is traced frame by frame and reconstructed, ordinary landscapes take on a quiet sense of unease, as if they were scenes from a dream.

What appears in these works are not extraordinary incidents or dramatic moments. Rooms, street corners, traces of human presence, the flicker of light. Although they may seem like familiar scenes, they quietly pose the question: “Are the things we see truly there before us?”

When facing Sato’s works, we may find ourselves moving back and forth between reality and memory, presence and absence, what is visible and what remains unseen. It is precisely this ambiguous sensation that gives shape to the powerful lyricism of his work.
As you move through Sato’s works from his early period to his later years, we invite you to trace, here in the exhibition space, the gaze that runs through his practice and the quiet eloquence held within everyday landscapes.