EXHIBITIONS
Nao Tsuda “LO”
Dates: Apr 3 – May 2, 2026
Location: Taka Ishii Gallery Photography / Film
Opening Reception: Friday, Apr 3, 18:00 – 20:00
Taka Ishii Gallery Photography / Film is pleased to present “LO,” a solo exhibition of the work of Nao Tsuda, on view from Friday, April 3 through Saturday, May 2. Following the exhibitions “LO: Risograph Print“ held in Tokyo in January and “LO: The Inverted Glass and the Cane” held in Kobe, this show features approximately ten photographs from Tsuda’s “LO” series, focusing on the theme of landscape.
Tsuda has traveled widely, including to the Kingdom of Bhutan, the Arctic, and Lithuania, producing work that illuminates human presence within landscapes and deep connections between people and the natural world. For the “LO” series, he traced the roots of Buddhism while traveling through the Mustang district in northern Nepal, where Tibetan Buddhist culture and traditions run deep. Over roughly a month, he traversed terrain at elevations of around 2,500 to 4,000 meters. When the air is clear, the 8,000-meter peaks of the Himalayas rise into full view, and the vast landscape conveys the depth of geological time and the grandeur of the natural world.
The landscape works in the “LO“ series are framed in a distinctive semicircular format, which Tsuda says grew out of the question, “Does a landscape need to be rectangular?” A certain feeling of buoyancy that stayed with him both in Nepal and after returning to Japan called to mind the view from a cupola (window of the type found at the top of a spacecraft or church tower), and it was this association that gave rise to the semicircular landscape. The resulting images, in which the upper edge of the field of vision seems cut off as if by the eaves of a roof, heighten the viewer’s awareness of the distance and relationship between themselves and the landscape before them. They may also echo the experience of ancient peoples in Nepal, looking out at the scenery through the mouth of a cave.
The title “LO” derives from “locian,” an Old English ancestor of the modern word “look,” and is also taken from Lo Manthang, the capital of the former Kingdom of Lo (Mustang). True to the meaning of “look” (locian), the act of seeing is at the heart of this series. Tsuda describes his own practice as “translation” and speaks of wanting “to reawaken, through photography, a world that existed before language.” Here, he trains his eye on sacred presences emerging within the memory of the land and the lives lived upon it, quietly rendering the landscapes he encountered while walking that distant terrain.
Nao Tsuda was born in Kobe in 1976. He received the Art Encouragement Prize for New Artists in 2010 and is currently a visiting professor at Osaka University of Arts. His publications include Kogi (2007), SMOKE LINE (2008), Storm Last Night (2010), SAMELAND (2014), Elnias Forest (2018), Eventually, Deer Become Men / Eventually, Men becomes Deer (2021), and the latest release LO (2025).
