As he grew up, Kenta “started to have a desire to produce something. At the time, there was a website where you could share snowflake animations that were designed with Flash and I posted some of my works on there… One of my happiest memories was when I received messages about my snowflakes from overseas,” he adds. And just like that, Kenta’s world “suddenly expanded” past the Kawasaki districts as a “connection with the rest of the world” erupted thanks to the internet.

With this newly found method of communication with the rest of the world, Kenta went on to major in painting at Tokyo Zokei University. But it was only when he began to think “about what art should be” that he started experimenting with photography. Kenta’s first photography project was conceived as a way to archive his childhood experiences, and as his practice developed, he started to consider the etymology of the Japanese term and what this really meant. To this very day, Kenta’s work is consumed by the consideration of the Japanese word for a photograph: “sha-shin”. “In Japanese, ‘sha-shin’ means truth,” he says. But for Kenta and many others, truth is not a fixed term with a fixed meaning: “Truth makes me think of a reflection, which is always moving and changing.”

“In Japan, there is a never-ending discussion around the true translation of photography. The word for photography should be ‘ko-ga’ which means ‘to draw with light from the past’.” By contrast, Kenta feels like the recognised word for photography, “sha-shin”, resembles “a kind of beautiful dialogue between Zen priests”. The Japanese character that translates as “sha” also has another meaning which refers to the word “u-tsu-su”, which means ‘to capture or reflect something’ in English”.