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The work "ABSCURA" by Lily Night, the title of which is a combination of "abstract" and "obscura". It is also the origin of the artist's thinking and creation.
The work is inspired by photographs taken during a three-day visit by her parents (≒intimate others) from China to the apartment where she was living alone in Tokyo.

A body that enters a space. Or an act that seems to unlash the body as a space. The images that emerge from these actions make us perceive the nodes of memory that have left the story of "family" and the time that is being multilayered.

And there are also expressed the paradox of nesting, the spatial perspective that tries to receive what is unseen outside the frame.
"ABSCURA" is a representation of a new dark box of photography that looks at interconnected individual life and society.

"Lily talks about the act of photography as below:

Just as the act of breathing has an effect on our minds, just as the contraction and expansion of our lungs are biologically linked to how we sense things, I attempt to express through photographs the relationship between the times and spaces I've lived through, and the past and present environments in which I find myself. By capturing parts of our bodies or of natural phenomena, I've tried to invert that relationship.

You could say she's trying to visualize her formative values or her link to the world through photography, as she explores the realm of her unconsciousness. Disentangling her relationships with family, blurring the outline of her existence, she observes, selects and rearranges the images as with the gaze of an outsider. Then she entrusts these fragments of her existence to others, and sends them out to somewhere far off and unfamiliar to be a part of the larger world, to be a part of our common ground. Lily's camera obscura leads us to the eternal tension between subjectivity and universality: each one of us has a unique perspective, yet we are only infinitesimal fractions of reality. We are replaceable and unreplaceable, and yet we have to confront our domestic and social links to the world."

LILY NIGHT

born in 1988, Harbin, Heilongjiang, China
BA Department of Aesthetics, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Saitama University
MA Department of History and Philosophy of Art, Kent University
MA Department of Arts Studies and Curatorial Practices, Tokyo University of the Arts

▪ Selected Exhibitions
2021 Enter the Void, NOHGA HOTEL UENO TOKYO
2021 Partially Anesthesia, Art Wall Gallery, Ginza Tsutaya
2020 LAST NIGHT, FUGENSHA
2020 i was real, Kanzan gallery
2019 Dyed My Hair Blond, Burnt Dark at sea, Emon Photo Gallery
2018 ligament, SONY Imaging Gallery

▪ Award
2019 the 8th EMON Photo Award, Grand Prix
2018 the 18th Photo "1_WALL", Final List
2017 the 7th TOKYO FRONTLINE Photo Award, Jury Prize
2017 the 33rd Higashikawa International Photo Festival Public Portfolio Audition, Grand Prix

▪ Public collection
Modena Photography Foundation, Italy
Higashikawa International Photography Foundation, Japan