Based in Hiroshima, the general incorporated association My Japan works to pass Japanese cultural tradition and the appeal of its regions on to the next generation. Its representative director is Lisa Mimura. A festival staged in a shrine, a walk up a mountain at dawn, a brush-making workshop: her work looks, at first, unusually broad. Yet all of it comes from a single aim — to turn culture from something stored away into an occasion that can be touched, and to hand it over. My Japan is the vehicle she built to do this.

From a Brush-Making House in Kumano

Lisa Mimura was born in Kumano, a town in Hiroshima Prefecture, into a family that makes the Kumano brush. Her family’s workshop, Bunkōdō, has been making brushes for more than a century. Selecting the hair, binding it, setting the base, shaping the tip: to her as a child, the movements of the craftsmen’s hands were not something remarkable but simply part of daily life.

Those who grow up beside a family trade do not always take up its value at once. Mimura came to feel the weight of the tradition after she left Japan. As a student she studied English and went abroad, and there she came up against two facts: that the name Hiroshima was known around the world more than she had expected, and that the image attached to it rested almost entirely on a single point, the atomic bomb. The town’s mornings, its mountains, its food, the handwork carried on there: from a distance, almost none of it was visible.

The same pattern held for the tradition at her feet. Kumano brushes, too, were known by name, yet few people ever held one or touched the craft behind it. To be known is not the same as to be touched. After university she first joined a cosmetics trading company as a salesperson, and later returned to the family business, taking part in brush sales and product development. There she arrived at a conviction: a culture is not kept alive by guarding it alone; it passes to the next generation only as the number of people who engage with it grows. That conviction became the starting point for My Japan.

Lisa pointing to her own baby-hair brush (taimōfude)

My Japan, the Vehicle

In 2018, Mimura established the general incorporated association My Japan, though the work itself had begun around 2012. Its role, as she defined it, was to connect the keepers of Japanese culture and regional tradition with the people who want them: to create chances to touch the culture that Japan’s long-held spirit has produced, and to carry it to the next generation. Rather than shut tradition away behind glass, she sought to place it into the hands of those who wish to touch it. For someone raised in a brush-making house, this was a natural idea.

My Japan’s activities appear, at first, to spread in many directions: cultural promotion, festivals staged in shrines, the making of tourism experiences, tree-planting workshops that link cities with rural areas, the upkeep of mountain trails, and talks on community-building. But these are not separate ventures set side by side. They are one principle applied to different settings — that a region’s history and nature should be offered not as something to consume, but as something to take part in. The breadth is not scatter; it is the reach of a single idea.

Turning a Morning into an Experience

That principle takes its clearest form in Asageshiki, the early-morning tour My Japan runs. Setting out on foot from Hiroshima Station, participants climb Mount Futaba at dawn, visit old shrines such as the Toshogu and the Inari, and take breakfast at the summit. Amid a view that reaches as far as Miyajima, tea is served in the open air. The name folds together asage, the morning meal, and the morning landscape, with the intent of turning the hour of dawn itself into an experience. Its theme, “Another face of Hiroshima,” is also Mimura’s own answer to the question she first felt abroad.

There is a reason the tour begins so early. Hiroshima offered little to do in the morning, and many travelers left without staying overnight. A morning tour encourages an evening’s stay, adding one more night to the town. Part of the tour’s revenue goes toward conserving Mount Futaba, so that visiting becomes a form of tending the land. Tourism turns from something passed through into something one takes part in. This exchange is what My Japan attempts, again and again.

A Return to the Brush

Having widened My Japan’s work outward to all of Hiroshima and to Japanese culture as a whole, Mimura is now returning to where she began: the brush. As a My Japan project, at Bunkōdō, her family’s workshop, she is preparing a place of experience for visitors from abroad. They tour the workshop, watch the craftsmen’s hands up close, make a brush of their own, and then face the paper with it. From brushmaking to calligraphy, it is time received not by looking, but by moving one’s hands.

Here the brush shifts from a product to be sold into an experience made together. The Kumano handwork that could once be seen only from a distance is reproduced, once, in the visitor’s own hands. To make visible what could not be seen from abroad, and to turn what was only a name into something that can be touched: what My Japan has aimed at across all its work comes together in the most personal place of all, the brushes of her own family’s house.

Kept Alive by Hand

Running through all of Lisa Mimura’s work is one quiet conviction about how things are kept. A culture only guarded and displayed grows thin. It passes onward in proportion to the number of people who touch it, make it, and use it. At a festival, on the morning mountain, in the brush workshop, what she does through My Japan is the same: to offer, and to hand over.

A brush is not a tool for looking at. Only when it is held and moved does it become writing. Hiroshima, and the tradition of Kumano, are the same: they endure when they are received into the hand. What Mimura is building, through the vehicle of My Japan, one occasion at a time, is the chance for that receiving to happen.

A R K portrait by Artist G!

Lisa Mimura was also drawn by Artist G! for A R K — an archive of portraits, each drawn freehand in one continuous line, kept for a future intelligence that will ask what it is to be human. Read more about the artist in Human Light: Artist G: From the Neuroscience of Bias to the Architecture of Presence.

photo: Mariko.A/ StudioTales

Born in Hatsukaichi, Hiroshima, Daichi Monden never left this land. Nearly forty years in television, and the years since he founded his own company. While so many set their sights on the capital, Monden stayed, and made the times where people gathered in this city. Yet the truest shape of his work shows not in the crowds themselves, but in what appears once they have gone — what remained after the festival ended, after the broadcast fell silent.

Two hundred thousand people, and what came after

In 1987, Monden launched the Hiroshima Castle Autumn Festival as its producer. Two hundred thousand people over two days. But what he really raised was not an attendance figure — it was a question: let us make the water of the castle moat clean again. In those years the moat was murky, and it smelled. What began as a mere festival slogan went on to move the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport and the City of Hiroshima, and was realized as engineering work that drew a channel from the Ōta River. A festival lasts two days. The clear water of the moat remained long after.

The event ends; it takes root in the city

This pattern returns again and again in Monden’s work. The first Hiroshima Food Festival, which he launched in 2005, drew 780,000 people over two days, and it continues to this day. The castle moat sightseeing boats he ran alongside it as an experiment later became an official program of the City of Hiroshima. It was the same in television. There was After-School Bulletin, hosted by Hideyuki Nakayama; there was Weekly Papa Time, which ran for twelve years and reached a peak rating of 33.1 percent. KENJIN, the late-night program he started in 1997, became a place where a young Hiroyuki Ariyoshi gathered his strength, and its in-house band, fronted by Kōji Kikkawa, reached variety shows across the country. What Monden made looked like one-time events, yet much of it stayed on — inside the city, and inside its people.

A conviction he named “chihōryoku”

Why Hiroshima? Monden has crystallized his answer in a single phrase: chihōryoku, the power of the local. In the regions, he holds, lie seeds of success more within reach than any in Tokyo — by population, he reckons, the odds of becoming the best in Hiroshima are roughly five times those in the capital. The regions are not a place to give up on; they are a place to win. That conviction is what has kept him in Hiroshima all along.

“Bringing the regions to life through film” became his life’s work. Itoshi no Hinagon, shot entirely in Saijō, Hiroshima, on the theme of municipal mergers; Yuki-onna (Snow Woman), invited to the Tokyo International Film Festival; and Labyrinth of Cinema, the final film of director Nobuhiko Obayashi. To make seven nationally released films while living in Hiroshima was, in its way, an attempt to turn the land and its people into something that stays: film.

And now — at EarthMotion

In 2018, Monden founded EarthMotion, Inc. The stage moved from a broadcaster to his own company, but the core of what he does did not change. The tool in his hands now is the moving image. Building on the craft of picture-making he honed in film, EarthMotion produces brand movies for companies, music videos, wedding records, cinematic portraits of people — all of it, in the end, the work of keeping a moment in a form you can return to, again and again. Just as a festival once left clean water behind and a program once raised the people who worked on it, Monden now records the people and the hours of Hiroshima through video, the most direct means of keeping there is.

The weekly kagura performances he began in 2014 at the Hiroshima Prefectural Culture Center still light up every Wednesday evening, more than a decade on. Monden has also spoken to younger generations about “how to seize a dream” at local universities, beginning with Hiroshima University of Economics. To keep, and to hand on. Even in the form of a company, that outline has not changed in the slightest.

On his profile, Monden writes plainly: from Hatsukaichi, a local producer who would love to bring Hiroshima to life through the power of the local. True to the man who calls himself someone who does what he says, what he has built up in Hiroshima is not the programs, the films, or the festivals, but the memory that people were truly here. Daichi Monden goes on doing the work of keeping that memory — now at a place called EarthMotion, in the form of the moving image — in the same city he has never left.

Links

EarthMotion, Inc. — Hiroshima, Japan
Website: https://www.earthmotion.net/
Contact: info@earthmotion.net
Instagram: @daichihiroshima
Facebook: facebook.com/daichi.monden
X (Twitter): @pokopenmon

PHOTO: Mariko.A/STUDIO TALES

Long before “multimedia artist” became a job title anyone could claim, OOF — born Jaïs Elalouf — was already doing the thing itself: mixing sound, image, text, and other people’s attention into something that could only exist live, in a room, for the length of a show. He started DJing in 1992. Three decades later, the pseudonyms have multiplied — Zzouf, Lunivers, JAÏS, and now simply OOF — but the underlying instinct hasn’t changed: take fragments that don’t obviously belong together and make them cohere, just long enough for an audience to feel it.

A DVJ before the word existed

OOF’s core practice is Cinémix — an audiovisual performance format he built around mixing music, film footage, and dialogue live, without a script deciding where any of it lands. Les Inrocks described the result as a mix “perfectly settled,” where “images, sound and dialogs amaze instantly.” He has taken the show to more than 40 countries and performed it over 500 times, from festival stages like Montreux and Burning Man to the Grand Palais in Paris, where he and his band performed as part of the “Solutions COP21” event — an evening built around the same electro-documentary project that produced his 2016 EP as JAÏS, “Infinie Expansion.”

Across roughly 70 films — mash-ups, animated shorts, documentaries — he has treated the moving image as raw material rather than a finished product. Commissions have come from institutions with almost nothing in common with each other: Le Forum des Images, the aviation group Safran, the Maison Rouge museum, the National Film Board of Canada (a large-scale projection mapped onto a 50-meter church using Norman McLaren’s footage), and in 2019, France’s National Audiovisual Institute (INA), for a project on the origins of electronic music made in duo with J.B. Dunckel of AIR. As an associate artist at Le Centquatre in Paris, he also produced the “Nuits Ouf,” large-format night events, and conceived “Dance Conscious,” a video project aimed squarely at the machinery of consumer capitalism — industrial food waste, fossil fuel dependency, the quiet guilt of getting on a plane.

A Tokyo and Kyoto chapter

OOF’s connection to Japanese art is not a recent interest. In his twenties, he spent time working as a DJ in Tokyo and Kyoto — a period that, by his own account, gave him a lasting familiarity with Japanese artists. It shows up on his own shelves: among the psychedelic and outsider-art volumes he keeps close at hand is “100 Posters of Tadanori Yokoo,” a collection dedicated to the celebrated Japanese graphic artist, whose hallucinatory, boundary-crossing posters helped define Japanese psychedelic and pop art from the 1960s onward. It reads, in hindsight, like an obvious point of kinship — Yokoo built a visual language out of colliding references in more or less the same way OOF builds a set. The connection continued professionally: in 2004, when the Cinémix album was released in Japan, OOF returned for a dedicated Japan tour.

A collector who built an archive of the overlooked

Parallel to his music and video work, OOF has spent decades assembling one of the more significant private collections of psychedelic art — more than 8,000 pieces. It is not a passive collection. He has curated roughly 60 exhibitions drawing from it, at venues including the Biennale de Lyon, La Grande Halle de la Villette, New York’s Outsider Art Fair, and the LSD75 festival in Basel. In 2017 he launched Psychedelic.fr to give the movement a dedicated home online. His work in this space also lives on lucydelic.com, alongside shop.lucydelic.com and psychedelick.com. He is now working to build the Psychedelic Art Center, a future permanent home that would house the collection inside immersive spaces of his own design — the Cinémix instinct applied to a museum rather than a stage.

He also founded Ping Pong, a music PR agency, in 1998 — a business that has represented Ninja Tune, among others, for some fifteen years. It sits a little oddly next to the rest of his work until you notice the pattern: whether the medium is a nightclub set, a gallery wall, or a press campaign, OOF’s role keeps landing in the same place — the person who makes sure something gets seen, heard, or understood, and usually by connecting things that arrived separately.

A discography built on aliases

His recorded work spans roughly fifteen mixtapes under the Acid Test series, the album Cinémix (Universal), and a string of alter egos: Zzouf, a breakbeat project released on Tru Thoughts in 2004; Lunivers, whose 2013 single “Happy Route” became a Radio Nova playlist fixture; and his most recent name, simply OOF, aimed in a more musical direction than his earlier audiovisual work. Télérama has called him “certainly the finest specialist in psychedelia in France.”

Be the Change

His most ambitious current project, “Be the Change,” is a transmedia film built around a single question put to roughly 80 people around the world: what is, in your view, the solution to changing the world? It is, in miniature, the same working method that runs through everything else he makes — gather what other people are willing to give, and build the container that lets it be seen.

Why this matters for Human Light

Human Light exists to record the presence of people who are living and working right now, before that presence gets smoothed into something generic. OOF’s work is, almost literally, about resisting that smoothing — collecting the art movements, footage, and voices that official culture tends to file away as marginal, and insisting they still have something to say. A man who has spent thirty years mixing other people’s fragments into something legible is, in his own way, already doing what this archive is trying to do.

photo: Mariko.A/ StudioTales

Before he was an artist, Artist G studied the brain. Born in Lebanon in 1971, he holds a Ph.D. in neuroscience, and for years he taught cognitive science and art theory at a university in Beirut — a position from which he watched, at close range, how the mind constructs bias, category, and belief long before a person is aware of choosing anything at all. It is not a background artists usually claim. But it is the key that unlocks almost everything Artist G has made since.

In 2009, he published Can One Man Save the (Art) World?, a book that marked his shift from studying cognition to intervening in the institutions that shape it. A year later came Mr. Obaidi and the FAIR SKIES® Corporation, which took the neuroscience of racial bias and set it directly against the closed logic of conceptual art — not as illustration, but as confrontation. The gesture was already unmistakable: Artist G was less interested in making objects than in making the mechanisms of looking, judging, and valuing visible.

By 2013 he had left the university altogether to work on art full-time. What followed reads less like a conventional exhibition history and more like a two-decade experiment in where the artwork actually resides — and who gets to be part of it.

A career built on other people’s presence

In 2011, invited to the 54th Venice Biennale as curator and commissioner of the Lebanon Pavilion, Artist G created institutional void in the Arsenale — a direct address to Yves Klein’s legacy, and to the empty space at the center of art’s own institutions. It was a rehearsal for the questions he would spend the next decade asking more insistently: who is allowed to be seen, and on whose terms.

The Better World Project, begun in 2013 across Europe and the Gulf states, gathered portraits and interviews from ordinary people rather than public figures — a project he later extended, in 2014, into a Palestine Edition timed to the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. That same year, working with GulfLabor.org’s “52 Weeks” campaign, he began Signing with Light, a performance-photography project confronting the labor conditions of the migrant workers building the Gulf’s new museum cities — the people whose hands raise the institutions that rarely raise them in return.

The pattern continues in Life Uninterrupted (Italy, 2017), where participants contributed objects, words, and gestures that Artist G rendered as semiotraces — symbolic marks turning an entire room into a shared, authored narrative. Across every project, the same premise holds: the finished object is not the point. The person who steps into the work, and what they choose to leave there, is.

A project bound for space

Since 2020, Artist G has worked under the A R K project — space-bound, quite literally, in intent. Its recent chapter, Power Portraits for Healing, is a series of portraits framed as instruments of emotional and physical well-being, later minted as large-scale mosaic NFTs and auctioned for charitable and institutional causes. Artist G describes the project’s ultimate gesture in strikingly literal terms: the portraits, encoded directly into synthetic DNA, sealed inside a capsule small enough to fit in the palm of a hand — with a trace of each participant’s DNA held within it in a capsule no larger than a fingertip — destined eventually for deep space, following in the footsteps of the Voyager missions and the Golden Records they carry. It’s a symbolic act of sending humanity’s record of resilience — its willingness to be healed, and to be seen — beyond the reach of any single institution or archive on Earth. It is a strange and moving extension of the same impulse that drove his earliest neuroscience-inflected work: the record of a life, or a wound, or a moment of contact, does not have to disappear.

In a 2021 interview with Cittadellarte, Artist G put the purpose of A R K plainly: it is “an archive project intended for the future advent of an artificial intelligence that will ask itself, What is it to be human?”

Now based in Paris and increasingly active online as “A R K by G!” (@theartistGR), Artist G continues a practice that has moved through Beirut, the Gulf, Rome, and Venice without ever quite settling into a single medium — photography, writing, performance, and what he calls meta-artistic intervention all serve the same end.

Why this matters for Human Light

Human Light exists to record the presence of people who are living, right now, before that presence is smoothed into an image the way generative AI increasingly smooths every face into something else. Artist G’s own trajectory — from a scientist mapping how the brain fabricates bias, to an artist who insists that the people in front of the camera are co-authors, not subjects — is an unusually precise mirror of that concern. He does not just document presence. He has spent two decades building structures, from Venice to deep space, designed to make sure it cannot be erased, simplified, or owned by anyone but the person who lived it.

A R K portrait: Lisa Mimura

Each A R K portrait is drawn freehand in one continuous line — a short act of attention held between two people for as long as the sitting takes. Lisa Mimura, founder of My Japan in Hiroshima, was featured in Human Light: Lisa Mimura, My Japan — Kept Alive by Hand.

Photo: Mariko.A / StudioTales

The Light of a Storyteller

“Paris is my city.”

He says it simply, without ceremony. And walking alongside David Beaulieu through the streets of Paris, you understand exactly what he means.

David is a French actor based in Paris. Trained at the Cours Florent, one of France’s well-known drama schools, he first took to the stage at 16 and acted until 28. Life then led him through music, songwriting, journalism, and business — but the pull of expression never left him. At 60, he returned to acting. His credits include AKA (2023) and Esprit d’hiver (2022).

He moves through Paris with a quiet ease. On the banks of the Seine, at the Galerie Vivienne, in the galleries of the Marais — he belongs. Not as a visitor, but as someone for whom the city is simply home.

Art, for David, is not decoration. It is conversation. He steps into exhibitions the way others step into a familiar café — naturally, without hesitation.

When asked what light he cherishes most in his life, he answers without hesitation:
“Love, of course. I mean love — and being loved.”

And what has changed him most:
“Maybe the loss of my first baby, at one month old.”

Some lights are born from darkness. Behind the ease and the warmth is a man shaped by real life — its joys and its losses alike.

As for acting — whether he feels most alive on stage or on screen:
“Both. It is always acting, with a few differences for sure.”

On a sun-filled afternoon along the Seine, Notre-Dame rising in the distance, the city holds still for just a moment.
This is Paris as David knows it. And in it, he is very much alive.

website: https://davidbeaulieu.fr/

Photography by Mariko / Studio Tales