artist profile: Kazuki Taguchi
I create spatial installations using natural materials and handmade paper, combined with light to transform the experience of space.
Work shown: “Standing between life and death”
Kazuki also offers a paper making workshop on two days (german / english). Visit THIS link for more.
How can an artwork remain fluid—growing, adapting, and resisting a final fixed form? Standing Between Life and Deathinvites both light and community to complete the work over time.
On 15 September 2025, visitors encounter a partial landscape: a glowing paper column suspended above a 1 × 4 meter water channel, its left bank lined with handmade paper lampshades. Each lamp scatters dappled light from within, powered discreetly beneath a layer of local soil.
From the opening day, a participatory workshop unfolds. Participants harvest wild grasses growing on the Hallen Kalk grounds, boil the fibres, and hand-beat them into pulp. Over three days the freshly cast sheets dry on site, until 19 September when the group returns to shape them into new lampshades—completing the right bank of the channel. The process becomes a performance, the outcome its visible trace: an artwork that grows together with its audience.
The uneven textures blur the border between brightness and shadow—an optical metaphor for the work’s central idea: change, dialogue, and empathy occur in the spaces “between.” Paper born in Saarbrücken, re-formed in Cologne, and destined for future exhibitions carries the philosophy of flow, not fixity. Like the Prajñāpāramitā phrase “form is emptiness, emptiness is form,” the installation collapses dualities—life/death, light/shadow, maker/viewer, city/city. Light itself becomes the invisible thread, linking every point in space, activated only when it meets mist, wall, or human skin.
