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.”

Utilizing animated CGI producing unnaturally vivid colors, the video landscape “Home Port” depicts the past and future of Lahaina, on the Hawaiian island of Maui, from the viewpoint of whales in its waters. Though ravaged by wildfire in 2023, the town, inhabited by Japanese immigrants and their descendants, remains historically and culturally significant. Harada, having researched migrants who left Hiroshima and Yamaguchi for Hawaii, calls Lahaina “a home port for the whales, Hawaiians, and Japanese Americans.”

Hawaii also features in “Shadowing” (2022–), a series of videos also on display at Anomaly in which digital humans modeled after Japanese Americans narrate stories in Hawaiian pidgin English. Harada’s voice echoes these figures as motion capture technology links their expressions to his. The work deals with themes of culture, immigration and identity, exploring how humans shift forms through places and generations –– like spirits, or shadows of our own selves –– while retaining something quintessential we cannot escape.

The video landscape “Home Port” depicts the past and future of Lahaina, on the Hawaiian island of Maui, from the viewpoint of whales in its waters. | YUKI HARADA

Harada launched his career in 2012 with a scholarly text on Christian Riese Lassen, a Maui-raised marine painter who received little critical favor but captivated bubble era Japan with Technicolor fantasies of Hawaii’s soaring dolphins and majestic sunsets.

Asked about his thoughts on high-brow vs. low-brow culture, Harada says he doesn’t see a big difference between unexamined acceptance and unexamined rejection of popular art. Indeed, his works often include visual allusions to celebrated artists such as Edward Hopper (1882-1967) or Kaii Higashiyama (1908-99). They shouldn’t be interpreted as simple tributes, however. “In this age of rising populism in society, we need to think carefully about how images operate,” the artist says.

It seems natural, then, that Harada’s path to photography was led by skepticism. He initially viewed a photograph’s artistic value as too subjective to judge, saying, “Most photos are almost worthless in a commercial sense, but they can be priceless to a person if they capture the right memory.” It was in this very contradiction that he would find rich grounds for expression.

He began amassing unwanted photos destined for the junkyard, building a collection he describes as “a mountain of images, slipping through the cracks of both familial love and capitalist logic.” Harada uses these discarded photos in “One Million Seeings,” a video in which he spends 24 hours looking at each of them (also shown to the viewer) to form emotional connections to their subjects. Filmed in a building in Tokyo’s Kabukicho neighborhood, known for misfits and runaway youth, “One Million Seeings” creates a “home” for these photos with nowhere else to go. It asks us to bear witness to what we might otherwise overlook.

An installation view of works in the series “Home Port” (2023/2024) is exhibited at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art and at Anomaly, an art gallery in Shinagawa Ward. | KATSURA MURAMATSU

“One Million Seeings” is also part of Harada’s show at Anomaly, alongside the recent “Light Court” (2024), a CGI image of a tranquil but eerily empty pastel-pink room overlooking the sea and reminiscent of the desolate ambience of “Waiting for,” where long shadows stretch across the floor and wall; a solitary chair faces the water; two framed paintings are turned mysteriously toward the wall, leaving us to speculate as to what they may portray. Again, Harada wants us to envision what isn’t there.

This scene is based on the “Lightcourt” space at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, designed by metabolist architect Kisho Kurokawa (1934-2007). Harada spent part of his childhood in Hiroshima and this circular, open-air plaza is etched in his memory “like a temple and also futuristic.” For Harada, whose work unites past, present and future — the invisible and the obsolete — art itself is a space where dreams emerge in this world of drifting shadows.