Yuki Harada’s contemplative artworks ponder vanishing

Despite creating artworks in a primarily visual medium, artist Yuki Harada wants us to look beyond the visible.

The Yamaguchi-born artist invites viewers to exercise their imaginations in works such as “Shinrei-shashin” (“Ghost Photos”), a series that started in 2012 by presenting installations of discarded photos that seem to haunt the margins of photography with their otherworldly anonymity and undesirability. (This would later grow into 2021’s “One Million Seeings” video work.) In the Samuel Beckett-influenced “Waiting for” (2021), a CGI animation over 33 hours long, Harada recites the names of all the animals on Earth as landscapes devoid of living creatures appear on screen. In this vision of our planet a million years ago and a million years from now, Harada seems to ask: Are we, too, destined to vanish like specters from a snapshot in time?

In the following years, Harada, 35, continued exploring these themes, resulting in two recent shows: “Yuki Harada: Home Port” (Nov. 30, 2024, to Feb. 9) at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art is a broader survey of Harada’s work, including “Waiting for,” while its sequel, “Home Port” (2023), is currently on view until March 1 at Anomaly, an art gallery in Shinagawa Ward, as part of Harada’s solo exhibition titled “Dreams and Shadows.”