The Osaka Folding Screen from the Toyotomi Period does not serve as a realistic urban record, but rather presents a symbolic image that reconstructs space and time to express the visual and cultural worldview of its era. The distortions in spatial representation and the mixing of timelines within the painting result from a prioritization of the “impression” of the city created through visual reconstruction—an outcome of its ontological status as a work of art. Such images, existing within the bounds of “closed communication” limited to select viewers, carried singular meaning and authority, remaining unreplicated and hidden. In contrast, contemporary society is governed by “open communication,” enabled by the material transcendence of information and its heightened capacity for dissemination, allowing images to circulate, replicate, and mutate. Through the act of recreating this folding screen, I seek to interrogate the discontinuities and continuities between past and present perceptual modes—and, ultimately, to reexamine the very conditions of perception that lie between them.

Rintaro Kato (born in 2001) is majoring in printmaking at Tokyo University of the Arts.
His artistic research explores how digital images—as a new form of visual information in contemporary society—are influencing us, using various approaches to make these effects visible.