Atsushi Momoi
Japan
Artist's contact
limited edition
Atsushi Momoi
Atsushi Momoi’s work operates in a space between recollection and perception, where time collapses into image. In A Light Leads to Another, memory is no longer a stable archive but a restless series of associations—fragments of light that connect and dissolve like a half-remembered dream.
The artist uses the camera not to capture the world but to reconstruct the internal motion of thought. By photographing a slideshow of his own archive, he allows randomness and personal memory to become collaborators in the creative act. Each layered image becomes a lens on the act of seeing itself—evoking the flicker of consciousness, the tension between the ephemeral and the tangible.
Momoi invites us not to interpret, but to drift. His work resists narrative, preferring to hover in that uncertain space where light meets memory and where the invisible becomes briefly visible.
Vanessa Rusci,
curator of the magazine
Project
A Light Leads to Another.
This work is rooted in a personal phenomenon: how memories—fragmented and often unrelated in context—surface unexpectedly, as flashes of light. These mental images, emerging from various times and spaces, begin to resonate and connect, one light leading to another.
I experienced these memories as a gradual light emerging from the dark—growing brighter, shifting, sometimes fading—while coexisting with my awareness of the present. “Then and there,” reconstructed and reimagined through the lens of “here and now,” flickers in and out of consciousness. My inner world, I realized, is a layered architecture of memory.
To express this dynamic visually, I photographed the screen of my Mac while it played a randomized slideshow of my own archive—snapshots from the past brought together by chance. Watching these incoherent images appear and vanish felt surprisingly close to how memory functions.
By re-photographing these fleeting visual echoes and embracing photography’s nature as a medium of memory, I seek to trace a universal experience: how the past continues to shape the now. My aim is to reconsider the fragile, flickering thread between memory and presence.
Artist statement
In most of my projects, I start from a strange or off-centered feeling I experience in everyday life. For instance, as a child I could never reconcile the coexistence of nature and art: all man-made things have authors, while nature does not—yet both share the same space.
These sensations of unease and misalignment have developed into a deeper interest in the environment—both natural and artificial—and how it shapes our perception. My work is a visual exploration of the internal experiences triggered by our interaction with the external world.
Ultimately, I aim to depict the multilayered images that emerge during the process of perceiving, influenced by others, society, and the world itself. We can only see the world through our own point of view—but through photography, I try to bridge the personal with the universal.