Statement

Chihiro Kaneko is a photographer who works across disciplines.
She works in search of answers to her own questions.

She is currently working on the question of "boundary" and "perception".
For example, Kunio Yanagida, the founder of folklore, wrote in his book "Yokai Dangi”
“The feeling of naming the evening "Omagadoki" or "Gamagadoki" and recognising it as a bad time has long since died out in the town.”
“In the Tohoku region, twilight is also called “Omoandoki” because it is said to be the time when the Amanojaku come out to walk.”

Kaneko Chihiro was a child of the Tohoku region who grew up hearing the story of the Amanojaku.
"Poor Urikohime, poor Urikohime".
She remembers her grandmother talking in the Sendai dialect about the horror of the Amanojaku.

Perhaps it is because of this, or perhaps for some other reason, Kaneko sometimes feels that the evening is a "scary" time of day. There is a 'strangeness' in the evenings that flows low and low underneath the nostalgia.

Kaneko thinks:
"Why do I feel this way?” And "Why did our ancestors feel this way?”
”What did they perceive? Is it an inborn, universal feeling? Or are they, as Kunio Yanagida wrote, 'long since dead' ?”
From just before dusk, which was once considered the "bad time", to the early evening, Kaneko stands at places that used to separate the other world from the present, such as slopes, bridges, mountains, borders, and crossroads, and records the scene.
A scene where something deep inside her reacted. A scene that made her heart flutter. This is what she captures in her photographs. These photographs remind Kaneko of her own perceptions.
Is it the same for others?　Will others be bothered by what makes my heart flutter?
She presents her photographs and observes the viewers. This is how she tries to answer the questions.
She observes, hypotheses, observes, and discusses. And repeat it.

The questions of cognition develop into questions of physicality, consciousness and unconsciousness, memory and play. We perceive the world through our bodies. But is this the true world?
Kaneko ponders.
“What we see is not always what we perceive.”
“What is the difference between what floats on the surface of our consciousness and what sinks into the unconscious?”
“Can we hear with our skin and see with our nose?”
“We can only perceive fragments of the world. We can only perceive fragments of the world, and in seeing and recording we are sometimes inferior to the camera.”

At such moments, there is a crossover from the study of the mind to the former study of engineering, or to the proximate study of science. If it is necessary to do something other than put reality into a photograph, Kaneko does it. If necessary, she picks up a paintbrush, or transforms a still image into a moving image.

In this way, she gradually accumulates answers to questions, however temporary they may be, so that she may be able to see the world as a whole.
That's how Kaneko sees it.

This is because Kaneko studied materials engineering at university and worked as an engineer in the past. She has seen first-hand how micro phenomena are connected to macro phenomena.
The ductility of a metal is due to the electron shell of the metal atom. The rupture of a metal is said to be the breaking of a metallic bond, when an external force separates the metallic bonds, i.e. the metal atoms, with such force that they can no longer share electrons.
The diagrams used to model atoms inevitably have difficulty in representing the electron. It is often assumed that electrons orbit around the atom at constant speed, like planets, but this is not the case. We don't know where the electron is until we observe it.
When we come across the destruction of an object, we sometimes need to imagine the subatomic particles, such as electrons, that lie behind it.
When we come across an accident, we need to look at the cases behind it that did not lead to the accident.
The accumulation of small things can lead to serious accidents. And vice versa, of course.

If the micro and the macro are connected, then the accumulation of micro questions will surely one day lead to a true understanding of the world.
It may not be possible in our own generation, but there will always be those who will follow.

From the above, Chihiro Kaneko is an artist who walks around looking for answers to questions.