This work's theme is the world and energy. By the world, I mean the earth we live on. The dictionary definition of energy is “Power or vigor; the capacity of light, heat, or other quantity to do work on another body or system”. But the energy I want to convey in this work is something more sensory — a force, a power, an existence — that we receive intuitively. My theme, then, includes exploring what this form of energy truly is.

My upbringing was strongly influenced by my grandfather, a Buddhist priest, and my father, an architect. Both of them had an unmatched love for living things, and they taught me that there are existences that those who can see them, can see, and those who can't, can't. They were not talking about ghosts or fairies; they were talking about more realistic essences — tiny seasonal variations, the breath of a living creature, the marvelous shapes produced by reflections of light: common but small fragments of existence we tend to overlook.

I was very aware of this when I started taking photographs. What caught my attention on a daily basis was the movement of animals, the swaying of plants, the changes in the sky driven by the wind, and other trivial phenomena like these, as well as the fascinating shapes produced by light and heat. As I routinely observed and captured in photos these aspects of the world, I started to view energy, which I had long wondered about, as the vitality and the life force inherent in my subjects.

For this project, I took honest portrayals of the subjects' actions and the generated phenomena. My intention was never in the howling or running of a wolf or a bird soaring through the sky. A wolf runs according to its own will, and rain drips down naturally. The challenge for me was to note these phenomena in photos with expressions that were, to the degree possible, distinctly mine.

In a world flooded with photos, I realized, even in a single photo of an animal running, the importance of communicating the life force in animals in a new format unique to me, so that the life force appears in a way never seen before. That's why I used a thermographic camera, which detects heat to form an image. Heat continuously changes with instantaneous actions and emotions. My purpose in using heat images was to present a purer representation of life, instead of the appearance of living things that we are accustomed to seeing. Another reason was thermographic images have an unusual symbolic quality to them. In keeping with this, I photographed non-living materials — using long exposures and flashes and employing photogram-like expressions — that makes them look symbolic. I did this because, in the same way as thermography of animals, it gives a sense of the pure energy in the object without the distraction of the objects' condition or appearance.

I think the two-dimensional effect of light and shade makes it possible to see the spaces in which the materials exist, the relationships between the materials, and other aspects we normally cannot see. For example, materials that look like the universe or glass and air that look like cells.

I think our world is an interesting and spectacular place full of wonder. This spectacular world, however, does not exist in my realm without my existence. Only because we exist can we recognize the world. For this reason, I photographed my own hand in this work. That's because I the hand, for me, is the point from which culture and civilization begins.

The action within action, which animals show us, and the action within stillness, which materials show us — these completely different subjects resonate together to form our world. I hope this work conveys this excitement and this way of viewing things.