The Light and shadow inside me series comprises two types. The greenish-blue works are paintings made by folding a single sheet of watercolor paper—first brushed with water-based ink—into an origami-like polyhedral form, exposing it to sunlight for several weeks, and then unfolding it.

The black-and-white works are photograms made in the same way on silver-gelatin photographic paper*, folded in a darkroom and exposed to a single point light. In both cases, the image arises solely from light and the support, capturing the idea that “all things, by virtue of their very existence, carry light and shadow.”

In the greenish-blue works, the surface begins uniformly greenish-blue; areas exposed to strong sunlight fade, while portions shaded by the work’s own folds retain their color.For the monochrome works, the process begins with constructing a custom huge darkroom. A continuous sheet is hand-folded into a polygonal prism—for example, a three-meter sheet scored with forty-eight straight fold lines and folded into a forty-eight-sided form—and then exposed for a few seconds to a single light in the darkroom, producing the image directly on the paper.

Quoted from
the catalogue EUGENE STUDIO / Eugene Kangawa: Power of Imagination Part 1/3 (Collection Exhibition, 2023)

“Light and shadow inside me is a signature series of two-dimensional works by Kangawa. For its black-and-white variations, whole sheets of silver halide photographic paper (*1) are folded into polygonal prisms, then taken into a massive darkroom and directly exposed under light for several seconds. (*2) The understated works, created with only their own light and shadows, offer a new perspective on the relationships between light and shadow, subject and medium, painting and photography, and beginning and end. Due to their distinct materiality and monumental size, the works are more than just ordinary photographs —in fact, they generate an imposing presence akin to paintings.”