MYOPIA
7 July - 3 July 2025
This July during Les Rencontres d’Arles, Kazusa Sato and the Schwär family presented MYOPIA, their second collaboration, at noa gallery in the heart of Arles. The exhibition opened on July 7 with a warm gathering in the presence of the artist and the Schwär family, and remained on view through July 13.
Rooted in a deeply personal question — “What does it mean to see, when sight is never quite in focus?” — MYOPIA explored the nuances of perception through photography, gesture, and material. For Sato, who lives with nearsightedness, vision has always existed in a space between sharpness and sensation — a tension that mirrors the act of photography itself.
The exhibition was born from Sato’s longstanding friendship with the Schwär family, a multi-generational group of artisans living in the Black Forest. Their way of life — grounded in nature, and guided by the hands — shaped the tone and texture of the project. Watching them prepare materials with care, handcraft frames, and share stories of their clients revealed to Sato that vision is not merely an optical function, but a relational one.
MYOPIA reflected this realization — that to see is also to feel, to sense, and to slow down. It invited visitors to move away from the idea of sight as correction and toward a notion of vision as connection. Through a quiet and tactile presentation, the exhibition opened a space for embodied seeing — a movement from perception to presence.
Through this collaboration, Sato and Schwär offered MYOPIA not as an answer, but as an invitation: a lens through which to consider how we encounter the world, and each other.