Embodied Perception, Image, and Distance—Coastal Landscapes by Daniel Reuter and Chikara Umihara
"O" by Daniel Reuter and Umihara Chikara (Roma Publications/Arts Council Luxembourg, 2025)
On 13 October 2025, the six-month-long Osaka Expo came to a close.
Against the initial target of 28.2 million visitors, the final attendance reached 25.5789 million. Although the goal was not fully met, considering the controversies leading up to the event, the Expo can be regarded as a considerable success.
Among the many nations presenting diverse concepts, the Luxembourg Pavilion commissioned a photographic project by Luxembourgian photographer Daniel Reuter and Tokyo-born Japanese photographer Chikara Umihara as part of its official program.
The two produced their collaborative work, "O", during a one-month stay in Osaka in 2024. Initially, the two considered working at the site of the 1970 Osaka Expo—once a showcase of post-war Metabolist architecture—but through their research and time in the city, they decided instead to focus on Osaka’s vast port area: a layered landscape of artificial islands, industrial zones, and residential districts that unfold along the city’s periphery.
The photographs they created are highly fragmentary and abstract. They seem to assemble the indistinct mental image many of us hold of "the Bay Area," presented here as colour and black-and-white photographs printed on papers with contrasting gloss and matte textures. For readers unfamiliar with the place, it is nearly impossible to reconstruct a complete view from these fragments.
This abstract approach arose from an incident during their residency. One day, at a local restaurant, the owner asked whether they were in Osaka on business. When they explained their purpose, he remarked, “That area—Yumeshima—it feels so far away.” In reality, the site is only about thirty minutes away by public transport. They began to wonder why it felt so distant to him. They concluded that it might stem from the relationship between physical and psychological distance.
The clarity—or intensity—of the images we hold of familiar places is shaped by fragmentary glimpses: scenes seen from a train or car window, or recollections that assemble within memory. The restaurant owner might have perceived the area as psychologically distant due to the lack of visual clarity.
In the accompanying text, Reuter and Umihara point out that Osaka Bay shares the typical visual features of other port cities—stacked shipping containers, large trucks, wharves, and coastal roads. Once suggestive of the future, these motifs have now become standard elements of any harbour landscape. In expressing this uniformity, their fragmentary and impersonal photographic approach feels entirely apt.
That this monotony is intentional becomes clear when one looks at their previous works. Those familiar with their practices will notice how markedly different O is from their earlier projects. Reuter’s style has shifted considerably, especially when compared to his previous works. To achieve visual uniformity, the pair deliberately abandoned individual authorship and dramatic effect.
Although a collaboration, the book does not reveal who took which photograph. The bilingual texts in English and Japanese do not specify who wrote them either. Moreover, the book has no definite beginning or end: read from right to left, it opens with a Japanese foreword and ends in English, but it can also be read in reverse. Yet beyond these formal traits, what most defines the work is its sequence of colour and monochrome images that lead the reader into a visual labyrinth.
Throughout the book, similar images appear repeatedly—an experience that echoes what one feels when walking through such homogenous urban zones. On closer inspection, one realises that the same images recur in colour and black-and-white, mirrored from the opening and closing sections. O is meticulously designed to make the viewer experience this deliberate monotony.
For a collaboration representing a national pavilion at a world exposition, O is, in a sense, an unusual work. Though produced in Osaka, it largely suppresses the individual backgrounds and identities of its authors. Rather than reading it as an “Expo project”, it is perhaps better understood as a work that simply uses the occasion to reflect on the city itself.
Through its experimental approach, O poses a fundamental question—not about the Expo’s fleeting celebration, but about how we look at cities. Through its carefully constructed book design, it invites readers to perceive this question both physically and psychologically. As the two artists sensed in their encounter with the restaurant owner, the result is ultimately a book that asks each of us to reconsider our own sense of embodiment, image, and distance.
Article by Yukihito Kono (October 28, 2025)
Title: O
Artist: Daniel Reuter/Umihara Chikara
Designer: Roger Willems
Publisher: Roma Publications/Arts Council Luxembourg, 2025
Format: Hardcover with dust jacket
Size: 160 x 220 mm
Pages: 188
Language: English/Japanese
Edition: First edition
ISBN: 9789464460865
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