One's Point of View (1994)

The image that is inside a white donut shape is a reduction of the image that has been cut out of the picture by the outside of the white donut shape.

Although this is an ordinary work in which an image that has been detached from a certain spot is reduced in size and a blank space is produced, that blank space is not just a blank space but appears as a space with depth that extends into the distance. This was a major discovery I made. When an observer looks at the picture together with the image of the small white floating circle, the white donut-shaped blank space that can be considered a cosmic space has an effect; the image inside the white circle rejects being in the same plane as the image outside and continues to move subtly.

The following is a critique by Fumihiko Maki, one of Japan’s best-known architects.


One of the works by him which I think deserves most recognition is “One’s Point of View,” in which he takes a subject whose image he has taken and cuts out a part of by means of a white donut shape. Amazingly, the cut-out portion is made completely independent of the subject by the white ring; one discovers that, though it is a part of the subject, the world of a completely different image emerges there. He probably did not anticipate the existence of such an image when he originally took a photograph of the subject. However, the existence of the cut-out image only became possible through there being a relationship with an appropriate contour and proportion between the whole and the part. That is a creative act. It indicates that an infinite number of such imaginable parts are hidden in every subject. And it shows the possibility that each part in turn possesses an infinite number of parts.(…).Yahagi can be said to have opened up a new field of visual art that indicates the existence here too of an infinitesimal world.”