Name: Vessels of Light
Price: 1790 TWD
Availability: InStock
ISBN: 9784865412253

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AKAAKA

Photography

Hardcover

240 pages

194 x 261 mm

ISBN 9784865412253

Japanese, English

Apr 2026

The beginning of my journey
Is the beginning of yours

In exploring ways of put down roots in her two homelands, Japan and Romania, Ana Scripcariu-Ochiai has created works including installations, photographies, videos, and paintings, all centered on the theme of “the bond between land and people.
Fundamental to this continuous practice is attention directed not only toward human beings, but toward all living beings—toward life itself—as well as an earnest desire to connect ‘I’ and ‘you.’

Ana Scripcariu-Ochiai has two homelands—Japan and Romania—but having been born and raised in Japan, she knew little about Romania. However, living in Japan’s strongly conformity-driven society, she was often subjected to unfair judgments based on her appearance that left her in an uncertain, suspended state between the two that was both and neither. Why was she made to feel this way? Beginning from those kinds of personal questions, her interest gradually shifted toward the social structure itself that brought about such situations, which, in a sense, was a very natural progression. It was exactly in order to believe that ‘I’ was not alone, that she had to hold fast to the connections between herself and the world around her, and to feel, no matter what, the continuity of life in its many forms—and so that ‘I’ might also be ‘we.’

It took Ana Scripcariu-Ochiai five seasons, starting with winter 2022, to feel at home in the country where her father had been born: Romania. Her decision to come to Romania in December 2022 was a courageous act: the upheavals caused by the pandemic were being experienced all over the world, but besides this, there was a feeling of insecurity in the air as a consequence of the state of war in Ukraine, so close to the Romanian border.

All Ana Scripcariu-Ochiai’s images are luminous. They show people, things, and places, seemingly in a celebration of the present, but also of the past: testimonies to the meaningful passage of time. In the first place, in the photographs we can admire in this book, we see portraits of people, grandfathers and grannies who have lived a long life, but also children and mothers with children in their arms, celebrating the time fragmented by some custom.
Ana Scripcariu-Ochiai also lets her gaze linger on the objects that make up the landscape and the living creatures that populate it. In other cases, people are presented through the unobtrusive gestures they make: a hand raised to greet someone in the distance. There are old photographs from which grandfathers and great grandfathers look out at us as from a story, as if they were carrying on a conversation with us, the viewers.

We witness an inevitable passing of time and a breaking up of light into droplets of rain or flakes of snow, as in a dialogue that speaks about yesterday, but also about tomorrow. It is a dialogue involving man and nature too, via all its elements.

As if opening her eyes to the world for the very first time, she receives the light and colors she encounters simply as they are. She is looking toward the light that precedes the ‘I.’ It is a gaze as unguarded as that of an infant, through a camera that seems almost an extension of herself.

“V e s s e l s　o f 　L i g h t” gathers the time spent with people encountered along this journey, and the memories held within the lands themselves, as they are quietly poured inward. The book traces a process in which a single artist approaches her own origins, while at the same time illuminating the invisible vessels that reside within each of us.

The tactile cloth-bound cover, and a fragment of the artist’s poem—hand-applied and gently placed between the photographs—invite an intimate encounter with the work. Conceived as a book that can be felt in the hands and resonate with the spirit of each reader, this volume is released into the world as a quiet yet profound offering.

AKAAKA