Selecting judge: Yuki Onodera

The subject of this work are the unfortunately common phone scams in which criminals pretend to be a relative in distress. The artist has managed to create book on the topic with the scale of a blockbuster movie. The world he creates has depth and complexity, and its uniqueness piques the viewer's imagination. To be more precise, the work leaves its interpretation to the viewer's imagination, placing a basic tenet of artwork in clearly tangible form.

Even though the cases presented are non-fiction, fiction and non-fiction are entangled through the multifaceted use of photographs of various layers (dimensions). The work underscores the inherent nature of photography: that photographs take their meaning from the context in which they are placed. It playfully and boldly mixes together some truth, which is the essence of photography, and some fiction, the flipside of truth. This same essence comes through as the work documents its subject, the malicious and pathological crimes of Japanese society. The sheer volume of this book, which is so large that your hands get tired from turning the pages, is incredibly persuasive, which is fitting for a production of this scale.

It will not be easy to display the full arc of the book's content on a single wall.

The artist will have to experiment freely with various possibilities to find a way to exhibit the work so that it maintains its impact while conveying its message clearly to viewers.