柴田まお / Mao Shibata

Venue: (14)下吉田第一小学校プール(みずほ公園隣り)

About Works: [Curatorial Comment]

Traces of the building’s former use as an elementary school swimming pool remain throughout the site. A shallow layer of water fills the pool basin, from which rises a blue textile structure loosely modeled from lotus flowers that grow in Asumi Lake in Fujiyoshida, a lake known for its lotus ponds. Along the poolside, multiple monitors display real-time footage captured by cameras placed around the space. The original lifeguard towers and rescue tools also remain, preserving the logic of a place where safety once depended on surveillance and being seen.
Shibata has long worked with chroma-key techniques in which blue sculptures “disappear” within the video image, using this mechanism to examine the boundary between the real and the virtual, presence and absence, and the dynamics of seeing and being seen. In this work, visitors can enter the “lotus pond” wearing rubber boots. The blue textile blocks the cameras’ view, causing the visitor’s body to temporarily vanish from the monitors, as if shadowing the many creatures that hide from predators beneath the lotus canopy. Yet the safety once ensured by the lifeguard’s vantage point is no longer operative, leaving the viewer both concealed and unprotected.
The installation reframes the binary of “seeing/being seen” into the more complex relation of “being targeted/being protected,” placing the responsibility of the interpretation of surveillance onto the viewer. As advances in AI, autonomous drones, and other surveillance and weapons technologies intensify debates around privacy and safety, textiles themselves are becoming implicated in these systems—for instance, through fabrics developed for AI camouflage. Against this backdrop, the work illuminates shifting relationships among visibility, protection, presence, and disappearance.

[Artist Statement]

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, our physical connections have been restricted, and much of life has shifted onto screens. This change has affected not only how we interact, but how we sense distance itself—blurring the boundaries between real and virtual, presence and absence. My work explores the connections and separations that arise in this in-between space, layering physical sculpture with digital imagery to examine how people relate and communicate in the information age.
This work continues my earlier exploration, layering it with the history and memory of Fujiyoshida, a city at the foot of Mount Fuji. The area is blessed with abundant spring water flowing from the mountain and has long prospered as a center of textile production. It has also served as a gateway to Fuji worship, where people’s prayers and daily lives have long been intertwined with nature.
Drawing on the memories of water and fabric, as well as the spirituality rooted in faith, this work reexamines the relationship between what can and cannot be seen in the present day. Its motif, the lotus, takes inspiration from Asumi Lake (also known as the Lotus Pond) in Fujiyoshida. Rooted in the mud yet blooming in pure flowers upon the water’s surface, the lotus has long symbolized the mediation between impurity and purity, reality and illusion, interior and exterior. This structure resonates with the spatial composition of the work itself, which moves back and forth between the real and the unreal.
In the exhibition’s indoor pool, a thin layer of water covers the floor. Blue aluminum lotus leaves, blue fabric veils, and projected images are arranged in overlapping layers. The installation is captured with a camera, and through chroma key compositing, the color blue disappears on-screen, revealing a different image from what exists in the space—yet the objects remain physically present, visible only to those who are there. Viewers step into the shallow water, disturbing its surface with ripples and reflections as they sense their own presence within shifting light and image. The scene continuously changes, as the real and the virtual, the material and the illusionary, overlap. These slight gaps and misalignments lie at the heart of the work.
Blue Lotus invites reflection on seeing and being—on how light, water, and image shape our perception—and on the quiet form of life that emerges between the real and the virtual, the body and data, memory and the present.

Artist Profile: 柴田まお / Mao Shibata
Born in Yokohama in 1998. Shibata earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Sculpture from Tama Art University in 2022, and a Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture from Tokyo University of the Arts, Graduate School of Fine Arts in 2024. She creates sculptures and installations inspired by the diversifying relationships amongst people in the modern age, and the means of communication. Mao Shibata uses sculpture, a physical expression, as base and merges digital expressions symbolizing the modern information society, to make the boundary between reality and illusion ambiguous, striving with how to express the present that we live in.
Major Exhibitions include Extreme Cold Art Festival Teshikaga 2019-2025 (Teshikaga, Hokkaido), ARTISTS’ FAIR KYOTO 2025 (Kyoto), SONO AIDA#TOKYO MIDTOWN AWARD (Tokyo), ROKKO MEETS ART 2024 beyond (Hyogo).