Meisai Okamoto

ARTIST STATEMENT

Pinhole Camera Extended

We decide that “this is how the world is”, without ever doubting what we see.
But have we truly seen it? Governed only by the strength and direction of light,
are we not simply looking at what we have been shown?

A pinhole camera gives form to a single simple principle: that light travels straight.
There is no correction by a lens, no deliberate selection.
Light passes through a hole and binds the world together. That is the whole mechanism.

I extend this apparatus not to look at a landscape, but to make a place that asks
how the act of seeing itself shapes the world.

Where does the real end and the image begin?
Why does what should be visible pass by unseen?
Perhaps it is not that we cannot see it — only that we are not looking.

The world is always there.
The question is what, and how, we are each trying to see.