Taketo Muroi - Afterimage 6

Technique: Promptography on Hahnemühle Fine Art paper
Image size: 45 x 30 cm
Edition: 3 + 1 AP
Year: 2025

Afterimage 6

Afterimage 6 deepens the visual logic developed within the series and leads it into a quieter, almost contemplative state. The already familiar horizontal layering of the image – a recurring structural principle in Murois' Afterimage works – here becomes the vehicle for a philosophical interpretation that explicitly references Japanese animism and Zen Buddhism.

The upper part of the image depicts a deserted, seemingly neutral landscape: asphalt, puddles, fences, and scattered lampposts. Everything appears functional, empty, and spaced apart. This world is clear, cool, and controlled—a surface of modern order. But the reflective surface of the water disrupts this rationality. It doubles the space, distorts it, and destabilizes it. Perception is not confirmed here, but rather unsettled.

In the lower layers of the image, the picture begins to dissolve. The landscape tips into sediment-like deposits of color, texture, and fragments. What was just a moment ago a representation becomes material. This zone is less reminiscent of photography than of layers of earth, of deposits of time. In the logic of Japanese animism—in which even inanimate things, places, and materials are considered to possess a soul—this transformation appears logical: The landscape is not an object, but a state that changes, remembers, and responds.

From a Zen Buddhist perspective , Afterimage 6 defies any definitive meaning. The image offers no center, no focus, no narrative anchor. Instead, it invites silent contemplation. The transitions are more crucial than the forms, the in-between more important than the depicted subject itself. Perception becomes a process – fleeting, unfixable, constantly changing.

Within the context of Taketo Muroi 's media-critical practice, this work becomes a reflection on digital images in the age of artificial intelligence. Here, the image is neither pure simulation nor documentary evidence. It is an afterimage in the philosophical sense: a residue, a trace, an echo of perception.

Afterimage 6 thus formulates a subtle but precise critique of the Western notion of image control and unambiguity. The work proposes instead an approach that unfolds its aesthetic and ethical power in the acceptance of blurriness, transience, and transition.