UNSEEN Amsterdam 2024

Tokihiro Sato / Willem van den Hoed - Roger Katwijk Gallery

Dream worlds

Although the work and methods of Willem van den Hoed and Tokihiro Sato are very different, their approach to photography professional practice is something that connects them. Both their work is on display at Gallery Roger Katwijk during UNSEEN 2025.

As an architect, Van den Hoed prefers to view the city and urban structures from a high viewpoint. The city is photographed over an extended period, sometimes during the day and night, only to be recreated in the studio into a new image consisting of hundreds, sometimes thousands of photographs. They are the result of prolonged and very precise observations. The predetermined urban fabric of roads, dwellings, skyscrapers, monuments and green structures is guiding and perspectively correct and forms the bedrock for the new image Van den Hoed creates from them.

A new city unfolds, is true to nature, meets all architectural requirements, yet harbors a tension between his observations and the world of his imagination. Balancing on the precarious balance between fantasy and reality, a true image emerges, the result of months of digital modeling. Van den Hoed’s most recent series of works are the snow drawings, serene worlds in which detailed photography is traced over by hand, a process of months per work.

Originally trained as a sculptor, Sato soon turned to photography. He wanted to capture the same sculptural spatiality in the photographic image, upon which he decided to reinvent photographic principles. Sato, after extensive study, manages to capture this spatiality in one two-dimensional image. The image composed of different layers and structures - where long exposure time, movements of the artist himself and projections create a spatial image. To do this, Sato designs his own tools, drawing on the past. With a pinhole camera, a life-size camera obscura, a camera lucida or a heavy beamer, he creates an entirely unique view of reality. Through physical bodily processes, time and the merging of images, the image is created, resulting in an enchanting dream world.

Sato: “About the new series Magic Lantern. I am interested in how light moves in and out through the lens of an optical system. This series was taken in the northern Japanese town of Hachinohe. In order to express the climate of the town where the exhibition was held, I photographed the town’s industry and nature as well as its traditional festivals, which I researched and photographed beforehand, and projected them into the landscape to create a new landscape.”

For both Van den Hoed and Sato, capturing the essence lies not in the very accurate recording of the subject - urban and natural structures or an interaction between them - but rather in taking time and distance from their subject, after which a new three-dimensional image emerges. With Van den Hoed, this process consists of carefully determining his point of view and then merging images, in an architecturally and perspectively correct grit, that he has captured from his panopticon. With Sato, it is the meticulous preparations he makes before proceeding to create the final image. Both artists pursue the creation of a perfectly ordered image in which the traces of human activity can be felt but not detected. An interplay of space and time create an image with eternal value. The image is timeless, time stands still.

Pim Hoff