Drawing on such motifs as ghost pho­tog­ra­phy and the paintings of Christian Riese Lassen, Yuki Harada’s work has explored the ethics of the image while testing the limits of his own body and perception.

Shown at a 2021 solo exhi­bi­tion at the 21st Century Mu­se­um of Con­tem­po­rary Art, Kanazawa, his thirty-three-hour com­puter animation Wait­ing for attracted wide­spread attention. The work is based on his interest in the water­side, a central element in both German Romanticist land­scape painting and 1960s conceptual art, and whose ambiguous spatiality Harada vis­u­al­izes through 3D CGI.

In addi­tion to Wait­ing for, this exhi­bi­tion features other new and previous works especially arranged for the occa­sion, including a new instal­la­tion using footage shot at Lake Suwa in Nagano as well as One Mil­lion See­ings, which records someone gazing at photographs over the course of twenty-four hours.

The titular word ecology refers to both envi­ron­mental preservation and pro­tec­tion as well as eco­sys­tems and the envi­ron­ment itself. Ecology that is “unreal,” on the other hand, adds a further layer of meaning: of artificial envi­ron­ments or eco­sys­tems. In the same way that ecology is a word with semantic breadth, the title of the exhi­bi­tion encapsulates everything from digitally gen­er­ated virtual spaces to the natural envi­ron­ment in the actual world, and the systems for dis­tri­bu­tion and con­sump­tion that we find in con­tem­po­rary soci­ety.

Through­out this exhi­bi­tion, Harada asks us to consider our ethics in response to the unique eco­sys­tem that “images” like com­puter graph­ics, video, and pho­tog­ra­phy possess. The three works featured in the exhi­bi­tion form a record of the art­ist’s prac­tice in which he confronts that problem by different means.