Hana Sawada “Viewing View (Display Window, Stroll)”

LAG is pleased to present Hana Sawada: Viewing View (Display Window, Stroll), on view from Friday, September 12 to Saturday, September 27, 2025.

Based in Kyoto, Hana Sawada completed her M.F.A. at Kyoto Seika University Graduate School in 2016. In recent years, she has attracted significant attention, exhibiting at the VOCA Exhibition at the Ueno Royal Museum in 2025, participating in the group show Incoming Breezes at Toyota Municipal Museum of Art in 2023, and appearing at the Aichi Triennale in 2019.

Sawada’s work, centered on photography and video, originates from everyday sensations and subtle, unassuming moments. In Gesture of Rally, she follows “unidentified objects” that appear accidentally in the corners of magazines or old photographs, investigating them in various ways. In Lightning Rods and Circumstances, she develops fragments of conversations she noted down from the streets, expanding them in various ways. Her Floating Video series (2021–), in which she projects the film Night of the Living Dead (1968) onto walls, furniture, and outdoor surfaces, draws attention not only to the narrative framework but also to the light of the imagery itself. Across these works, Sawada creates spaces that shift our perceptual and interpretive habits.

At this exhibition, the Viewing View video series will be presented. Here, Sawada uses everyday material—photographs, videos, screenshots, and memos stored on her devices—and transforms the acts of playing back and navigating these digital materials into a video work in itself. The accumulation of data we do not ordinarily pay attention to, along with habitual modes of viewing, will be visualized, revealing the slippages and uncertainties that lie between seeing and preserving, between intentionality and spontaneity.

We invite you to engage with Sawada’s practice, which opens new perspectives from traces of daily life and raises profound, elemental questions.

—Artist Statement—

I wanted to treat the photographs, videos, recorded memos, and other indescribable things that accumulate in the course of daily life and artistic practice as if they existed on the same ground—unclassified, mixed together, and continuous.

One of the ways to do this is Viewing View: by scrolling through and displaying numerous files on a screen with the movement of a finger or cursor, stitching them together into a single video, like a seamless patchwork without visible seams.

Hana Sawada