Canine silhouettes drift between mirrored surfaces, gazing silently at the viewer— awaiting, too, to be seen. They appear as deities, or perhaps as ghosts. Derived from the Eastern myth of the “celestial dog devouring the moon,” these figures once embodied ancient attempts to explain the sudden vanishing of light. In this exhibition, the myth is recontextualized as an allegory for the act of seeing—an interplay of concealment, misrecognition, and reappearance.
Ako Goto’s works unfold like a stage slowly revealing itself—where the story has yet to occur, but the set has long been in place. Her practice draws from childhood memories of participating in her mother’s theater productions, experiences that left her deeply attuned to the shifting boundary between reality and fiction. Sculpture, to Goto, is a kind of silent performer—enacting the complex roles of observing, embodying, and being observed.
As viewers confront their own reflection entangled with the presence of the “other,” the act of reflection invites an unsettling familiarity. It compels a reexamination of how identity is constructed. Yet the mirror is never neutral—its image always distorts, leading us into the fractured terrain of refraction, where “truth” is revealed not as singular but as a multiplicity of perspectives, continuously shaped by cultural context and personal experience.
By letting go of the desire for singular narratives, we begin to perceive resonances— subtle tremors of emotion and memory that echo across the cracks. “Resonance” here points to Goto’s pursuit of a perceptual commons beyond the self: a space where lived experience and fiction flow into one another, forging tacit, transpersonal forms of understanding.
The void left by the dog’s shadow, like the Daoist notion of xu shi sheng bai—“the empty room gives birth to light”—is not an ending but a beginning. Within this stage of clay, mirror, and light, the viewer becomes both witness and participant. At the intersection of the real and the imagined, the act of seeing becomes a form of being.
