I participated in Pitch and Toss, a special exhibition at Fujifilm Photo Festa 2026. The exhibition brought together 20 artists selected through the KYOTOGRAPHIE KG+ Workshop Open Call, and gave me the opportunity to present at Nodeul Gallery in Seoul the work I had previously shown in Kyoto.
Encounters, the second chapter of the Connections Trilogy, was developed from the beginning with the goal of being exhibited internationally. It was first presented in Kyoto, and I later found myself taking part in another exhibition at Nodeul Island that had not originally been part of my plans. I have very good memories of exhibiting there in 2025, and I have always been fond of Nodeul Gallery. At the time, I had almost no energy left to devote to another exhibition in Korea, but when I was given another opportunity to show my work at a gallery I liked so much, I could hardly turn it down.
In keeping with its purpose, I had been photographing Encounters across different parts of Asia. As I continued working across national borders, I had not had a chance to properly rebuild the sequence since submitting it to the open call. Kyoto itself was also one of my shooting locations, so even while I was there for the exhibition, I continued photographing whenever I had the opportunity.
I consider exhibitions to be part of the working process itself. I do not exhibit only finished work. Once a project has reached a certain stage and an exhibition is confirmed, I show the work as it exists at that moment. I listen to what people see and feel, and in doing so I discover things that I may have overlooked myself. Kyoto was no different. Alongside conversations with visitors, a question from Fujifilm’s president also led me to recognize something new in the work.
After returning from Kyoto, I had about a month before the next exhibition, but I had not fully recovered my physical energy or concentration after a continuing series of international exhibitions and shoots. I gathered images photographed in Korea, China, and Japan and quickly constructed a new sequence. The catalogue took less than a week to produce, with the actual editing completed in roughly two days. Fortunately, I had already developed a basic dummy-book format while preparing for an earlier book fair, which allowed me to work quickly by placing the new images into an existing structure.
Photo Festa 2026 also happened to include a section dedicated to dummy books, so I placed the dummy books for the first chapter, Relationships, and the second, Encounters, side by side. Encounters had first been shown in Kyoto, but Nodeul Island was the first place where I presented the overall structure of the Connections Trilogy to an audience.
I spent a great deal of time talking with visitors while showing them the first and second chapters in sequence. Eventually, I was explaining the work and having conversations for so long that I developed a headache. I tried to gather as many responses as possible about the direction of the work and what people actually felt when seeing it. People who make the effort to visit a gallery have already chosen to devote time and attention to looking at photographs. There was a clear sense of engagement in the way they looked at and responded to the work, and their reactions became valuable material for me.
By the final day, I had exhausted almost all of my physical energy and concentration, and I left the gallery almost as if I were escaping. I was grateful for the opportunity and gave it everything I could, but my body had not yet recovered from the schedule that came before it.
Afterward, I gathered the conversations and responses I had encountered at Nodeul Island and made gradual revisions to the sequence and selection of Encounters. The work refined through that process later became the material that led to new exhibition opportunities in Italy and London.