TAKESHI TOKITSU

In Japanese, the word kūki (“air” or “atmosphere”) describes an unspoken social force that shapes behavior without being explicitly articulated. This project explores how such atmospheres emerge, persist, and resurface across time. In 2025, eighty years after Japan’s defeat in the Pacific War, I began to question whether traces of a latent wartime atmosphere still remain beneath contemporary society.

ATMOSPHERE combines archival wartime and postwar newspapers with rephotographed Polaroid images taken since 2011, including photographs of Yasukuni Shrine and scenes shaped by disaster and pandemic. Through collage and the unstable qualities of Polaroid, the work examines recurring pressures toward social conformity and the ways collective memory continues to shape the present.

Website https://www.takeshitokitsu.com