まなざしのトレース / Tracing the Gaze, 2025

What was tormenting me? This is the story of my depression-escape, when I arrived at my view of impermanence by taking a step back and quietly reexamining the causes of my difficulty living in Japanese society. Japanese society has a high suicide rate, with many overworked and exhausted people and single-person households. In recent years, laws regarding mental health have finally been established, but many people are still screaming in pain. While some people desire their happiness and are in the midst of it, others only feel the emptiness of the word “happiness”. Others suffer from painful emotions like loneliness, lack of love, loss, alienation, depression, and jealousy. When people are trapped in endless, barren emotions, their vision becomes narrowed. Without realizing it, they choke on themselves, always lamenting about their unhappiness, pushing people away, and letting the feeling of wanting to die take over their minds. However, the world is a "representation" of what we see, and depending on what perspective and will we have, we can see the world differently. In order to make this possible, I take a social psychological approach to the events I see in my photographs, and find their relationship to society. The idea is to have a social point of view, rather than a first-person perspective. This means recognizing diversity, allowing people to be as they are, and feeling that everything in the world is fragile and beautiful. I believe that this “Acceptance of Impermanence” and a conscious shift in perspective to the Japanese aesthetic of “MONO-NO-AWARE” is the path to human happiness.
Taisuke Sato
KOUFUKURON - Eudaemonics
Taisuke Sato 
€42.00

1. Edition 4/2023
Texts by Taisuke Sato
Edit by Mauro D'Agathi
Book design by 89books
56 pages
31,5 x 22,5 cm
36 color photographs
Soft cover
1 20x30 cm signed color print included
Digital print

ISBN 979-12-80423-34-4
佐藤泰輔の写真集 KOUFUKURON – Eudaemonics は、幸福という抽象的概念を、痛みを帯びた視覚装置として可視化する。
そこに映し出されるのは、感情の表層ではなく、世界と自己との間隙に生じる位相である。
佐藤は、精神心理学の認知行動療法を取り入れながら、事象をいかに見るかを根源的に問い直す。
誰の目にも同じはずの世界は、しかし生きづらさの中で視野を狭窄させ、思考をループに閉じ込める。
彼のイメージは、その閉塞を切り裂く収斂する垂直と水平の構造を孕み、建築写真のような厳密さで観者に「もっとよく見よ」と迫る。
この写真群は、幸福の図像を再現するのではない。むしろ幸福が生成する臨界の場を捉えようとする。
そこでは、光と影の交差が、感受性の深層を刺激し、観者の内部で共鳴を引き起こす。
幸福は答えとして提示されるものではなく、生成する運動として透視される。
佐藤が言う「社会からの視点」とは、他者を赦し、人間存在の儚さを受け容れる感性に直結する。
その態度は、倫理的契機であると同時に、日本的美学の「もののあはれ」と交響し、人と世界のあいだに未分化の新しい位相を開く。
Eudaemonics――古代において幸福を論じる学の名を冠した本作は、21世紀における「幸福の方法論」を写像化したものである。写真はここで、記録ではなく治療的装置へと変容する。自己と他者、個人と社会が交差するその装置のなかで、幸福は一つの像に収まることなく、無数の回路として収斂と拡張を繰り返す。

Taisuke Sato’s KOUFUKURON – Eudaemonics visualizes the abstract concept of happiness not as an image of serenity, but as a perceptual apparatus tinged with pain. What appears here is not the surface of emotion, but a phase that arises in the interval between self and world.
Incorporating methods from cognitive behavioral therapy, Sato radically reconsiders the act of seeing. The world, which should be the same for all eyes, is narrowed under the weight of unease, trapping thought within repetitive loops. His images cut through this closure with the converging vertical and horizontal structures of architectural vision, pressing upon the viewer with a silent imperative: see more clearly.
This body of work does not reproduce icons of happiness. Rather, it seeks to capture the critical site where happiness emerges. The crossings of light and shadow stimulate the depths of sensibility and trigger resonance within the viewer. Happiness is not delivered as an answer; it is revealed as a process of generation, endlessly unfolding.
When Sato speaks of “seeing from the perspective of society,” he articulates not only a shift of viewpoint, but an ethical stance: to forgive the other, to accept the frailty of human existence. This gesture resonates with the Japanese aesthetic of mono no aware, where impermanence is embraced as a form of beauty. In this way, his work opens a new phase between human beings and the world.
Eudaemonics—a word resonant with ancient philosophy as the study of happiness—here designates a contemporary methodology of happiness, transposed into the photographic field. Photography, in Sato’s practice, is no longer a medium of record, but a therapeutic apparatus, where self and other, individual and society, converge and diverge. Within this apparatus, happiness refuses to remain a fixed image, becoming instead a circuit of convergence and expansion without end.