awai - in between

Awai is a 16mm film developed and shot during the Art Residency AIR 3331 in Tokyo.
The Japanese word awai evokes the subtle space that lies between things, a condition that is neither fixed nor absent. The film drifts through these thresholds and observes moments suspended in transition, moving between light and shadow, sound and silence, movement and stillness.

Across Tokyo, the camera seeks out places that resist definition and linger in a quiet state of becoming. A parking lot in Akihabara, not quite residential and not quite commercial, holds a calm and uncertain stillness. In Caretta Shiodome, an elevator ride turns vertical motion into a pause for contemplation, while the Meguro Sky Garden, a forest rising among skyscrapers, folds time and scale into one another.

Each of these places carries a different sense of awai — a rhythm of perception that unfolds between seeing and being seen, between presence and disappearance.

Through these fragments, Awai explores the fragile poetics of distance and connection. The work reflects on spaces where anonymity and intimacy coexist, where quiet observation becomes a way of being. The sound follows a slow walk through a park filled with the dense song of cicadas, their pulse merging with the hum of the city and turning the ordinary into something almost tender.