01 / Science & landscape
Why do we exist?
Within the world’s research laboratories, a landscape of human curiosity unfolds.
View the projectPhotography · Science · Memory
When the invisible
becomes a landscape.
Photographs from places where our understanding of the world is being remade.
Satoru Yoshioka · Kochi, Japan
Experimental devices, empty rooms and the traces of everyday work. A photographic inquiry into the places built to ask: why do we exist?
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Selected works
Ways of seeing.
Four connected enquiries, through photography.
02 / Perception & the body
the universe of the brain
A collaboration with Hermina Nedelescu, PhD, exploring a visual resonance between the brain and the cosmos.
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03 / Image & material
Tosa washi & platinum
Scientific landscapes meet handmade Japanese paper. Photographic images become objects that carry memory.
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04 / Seeing & transformation
Beauty Distorts
Monochrome images, an altered sense of the familiar, and the material presence of a print.
View the projectThe artist
Between the image
and the unknown.
“Why do we exist?” is a question that connects the scale of a particle accelerator with the intimacy of an image.
Born in Kochi, Japan, in 1963, Satoru Yoshioka works across scientific landscapes, monochrome Polaroid images, platinum-palladium printing and handmade books. After working in the United States, he returned to Kochi in 2007.
His photographs are held in the collections of the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, The Museum of Art, Kochi, and KEK, Japan.
Exhibition archive
Images in the world.
Black Traces / Sinking Light — Tosa Hakkinshi
PGI · Tokyo, Japan
9 July–6 September 2025Creating New Value with Tosa Washi: Platinum & Alternative Photo Processes / Act 2
Japanese Paper Museum Ino Town · Ino, Kochi, Japan
1–18 February 202430th Anniversary Exhibition: And the Ship Sails On
The Museum of Art, Kochi · Kochi, Japan
Contemporary Portraits from the Simay Collection
Oceanside Museum of Art · Oceanside, United States
Publications
The photograph,
held in the hand.
The book brings a sequence of photographs into a different kind of encounter: an image, a page, a pause. Yoshioka’s publications range from the scientific landscapes of Big Science to individually made volumes of Beauty Distorts and berlin.
Perspectives
What makes
a landscape?
In his 2014 opening talk on Sciencescape, curator Rei Masuda considers how the changing ways in which we understand the world also change what we recognise as landscape.
Rei Masuda · Opening talk, 8 November 2014. Institutional roles are recorded as at the time of the original talk.
Contact
A conversation
begins with an image.
For exhibition proposals, curatorial enquiries, publications and information about prints or handmade books, please contact the artist.