鉾井喬

Takashi Hokoi

In 2025, Hokoi Takashi captured the wind on film in Iceland.

This isolated island in the North Atlantic is a harsh living environment where the weather changes rapidly and strong winds blow throughout the year. At the same time, its people benefit from nature’s abundance, harnessing natural energy for electricity and using geothermal heat for everyday life. Through the winds of Iceland—one of the places where humans must directly confront nature—Hokoi reflects on the relationship between humanity and nature, and imagines its future.
Windgraph is a device designed to record the direction of the wind.

A pinhole camera is mounted on a tripod that moves like a weather vane, and the camera exposes the film for 8 minutes and 19 seconds. Always oriented toward the windward direction, the camera allows light to be inscribed onto the film as an image. The exposure time of 8 minutes and 19 seconds corresponds to the time it takes for sunlight to reach the Earth.

The work is created using photographic film.

By treating light not as a digital code but as a continuous quantity, Hokoi affirms light as both energy and duration, inscribing it directly onto analog film. The prints are produced by the artist himself in the darkroom using silver gelatin printing. This series of analog processes is an essential part of transforming invisible energy into a visual medium.

Hokoi Takashi’s practice centers on how invisible forces influence human perception and behavior.

His work originates from his experience as a pilot of a human-powered aircraft during his student years, when outcomes were dictated by the unseen presence of wind. Hokoi regards the uncertainty and invisibility of wind—whose totality and changes cannot be fully grasped—as structurally similar to phenomena such as war and natural disasters, which generate anxiety for humanity. He believes that visualizing wind can transform such uncertainty into imagination capable of opening paths toward the future.

Rather than presenting information about wind itself, Hokoi’s attempt to visualize the invisible encourages viewers to adopt an attitude of imagination—one that engages with unseen anxieties and expectations.