Yuji Watanabe: Yōkai and Landscapes
In Japanese folklore, the familiar world is never entirely separate from the supernatural. A figure encountered along a road, an animal glimpsed in the dark, or an object left undisturbed for years might reveal itself to be something else. These are the yōkai, beings whose forms and stories have been reshaped across generations.
Yuji Watanabe brings their haunting presence into dialogue with landscapes marked by legends and personal memories. Working with 8 × 10 Polaroid and ONE INSTANT peel-apart film, Watanabe embraces the material qualities of analog photography: its distinctive textures, subtle imperfections, and the unpredictability of the developing image. The physical process leaves its own traces on the photographs, lending them a quality that seems both immediate and strangely removed from time.
His images invite us to look beyond what the camera records, toward the stories and fears that shape what we imagine in seemingly empty places.