Nguyen Wahed is pleased to present Eyes Half Open, a presentation of experiential imaging technologies as sculptural installations by Goki Muramoto, marking the artist’s first solo exhibition in the United States. Working interdisciplinarily across information science, mechanical engineering, philosophy, and visual studies, Muramoto’s multimedia practice probes the origins of vision and perception as matrices of control, subverting the viewer’s singular perspective both sensorially and ontologically. Bringing together three interactive bodies of work —Imagraph, Lived Montage, and Training Wheels—the exhibition stages a choreography of sensory mediation and visual disorientation through original viewing instruments invented by the artist, exploring the textures of perspective, seeing images through closed eyes, the projection of memory, and the image production of the unconscious.
For Muramoto, the instability of vision and its relationship to reality has been a lifelong point of inquiry. Childhood anxieties surrounding the acts of showing, seeing, and being seen informed the artist’s understanding of power, surveillance, and spectatorship: namely, the command embedded within vision itself. Sensitive to the authority of images and the structures that govern them, Muramoto constructs situations in which perception becomes unstable, distributed, and collective rather than fixed within the individual subject. Across the exhibition, the viewer’s body becomes both receiver and transmitter, caught within systems of optical exchange that challenge distinctions between interior and exterior experience.
The work Lived Montage (2023–) originates from Muramoto’s engagement with cinematic history and the concept of “le montage vécu,” or “lived montage”: the speculative idea that individuals sharing an object of attention might also unconsciously share sensory information. Exploring the possibility of collective visual perception, the artist developed a network of interconnected goggles to be worn by participants. While wearing the goggles, internal cameras monitor the wearer’s eyes. Each time the wearer blinks, its system triggers a switch to another participant’s perspective of the same scene, collapsing multiple viewpoints into a single stream of shared experience. Like a film reel assembled through involuntary cuts, the resulting montage is collaged through the perceptions of others. Vision here is no longer private property, but porous and unstable. How does one “possess” sight? How can perception be verified as one’s own? Does seeing become a form of knowing? In an increasingly image-saturated culture shaped by surveillance technologies, algorithmic feeds, and monetized attention, Lived Montage transforms collective spectatorship into an intimate technological encounter, posing urgent ontological questions about authorship, subjectivity, and the instability of perception itself.
Similarly, Training Wheels (2022–) invites shared viewing through an unlikely optical device. To activate the work, viewers peer through the small aperture of a polished brass disc. This condensed field of vision produces an intensified focus on a selected fragment of space, imbuing the viewed image with sudden luminosity and weight. The experience evokes peering through binoculars, a telescope, or a paper tube, transforming ordinary acts of looking into concentrated exercises of attention. Each disc is paired with a textual prompt—such as “(Through this,) See, believing that everything has touched everything”—bridging perception with belief and the subjective construction of reality. Upon closer inspection, the brass discs reveal themselves to be altered 5-yen coins, hand-polished and removed from economic circulation through physical intervention. Historically associated in Japan with luck, connection, and spiritual offerings due to the coin’s homophonic relationship to the word go-en (“fate” or “connection”), the coins carry latent social and symbolic meaning even as they are transformed into viewing technologies. Simultaneously activating the physical body and intangible systems of belief, Training Wheels asks viewers to recalibrate their own perceptual “guard rails,” unsettling not only notions of assigned value, but also the ideological assumptions through which reality itself is interpreted.
Descending into the lower gallery, Muramoto’s Imagraph (2024–) takes the form of a reclining headset that projects images directly onto the viewer’s closed eyelids. Seen from afar, the installation resembles a speculative science-fiction apparatus: perhaps a consciousness-uploading device, a spirit docking station, or a machine designed for automated dreaming. Through thousands of optical fibers making direct contact with the eyelid, Muramoto’s novel imaging system becomes both intimate and invasive, collapsing distinctions between bodily sensation and technological mediation. Two suspended LED displays emit a sequenced color-field video controlled by the artist, while the blood-red translucency of the eyelid filters and transforms the projected light.
Physiologically, closed eyes conventionally operate as a boundary against external visual information, yet viewers still perceive phosphenes—fleeting lights, colors, and shapes generated through retinal stimulation. In Imagraph, however, the eyelid itself becomes a controlled screen or media interface. Though the projected sequence is predetermined, the viewer’s subconscious continually reacts to and interprets the abstract stimuli, generating what Muramoto describes as “the texture of imagination” or “the tone of the unconscious.” Phantom forms, memories, and sensations emerge involuntarily, producing what psychoanalysis terms “internal images” unique to each participant. Each optical fiber acts as an individual pixel within a matrix of visual commands, sharply contrasting the uncontrollable and private nature of dreams, hallucinations, and unconscious imagery. Suspended between technological precision and subjective projection, Imagraph transforms the act of closing one’s eyes into an encounter with mediated interiority itself.
Attentive to the technical, philosophical, and psychological conditions of image-making, Muramoto’s work destabilizes conventional understandings of vision as an instrument of power, individuality, and empirical truth. Instead, he proposes forms of viewership that are relational, porous, embodied, and deeply interior—modes of perception that resist fixed boundaries between self and other, observer and observed, image and imagination. Through Eyes Half Open, Muramoto brings viewers into intimate reengagement with perception itself, reframing our most elementary sensory faculties as sites of instability, projection, and collective construction. Across multiple technologically complex installations, the artist creates a closed circuit of viewing and sensory exchange that disorients the body while calling into question the presumed coherence of one’s own singular perspective.
Goki Muramoto
Born in Yamaguchi, Japan, in 1999, they explore “mediation”—encompassing perception, communication, and movement—through the invention and sculpting of their own media. Major works include Imagraph, an optical apparatus that projects video onto closed eyes through the eyelids; Lived Montage, glasses in which others’ vision is folded into one’s own at the moment of a blink; and Media of Langue, a dictionary-sculpture that depicts a chain of word translations. Solo exhibitions include Beautiful Medium (parcel, NEORT++, Tokyo, 2025), and their work has been presented in exhibitions in Japan and abroad. They also research personal and cultural sensitivity toward the medium itself, along with Medium-Art—the art of producing the medium itself as an artwork—from the perspectives of aesthetics and media studies.
Curation: Sofia Thiệu D’Amico
Technical Cooperation: Takeru Kobayashi, Joichiro Nogi, Kazuma Maruyama, Takuto Arizumi, Minori Manabe, Kazu Miyashita, Kai Fukubayashi,
Special Thanks: PARCEL, NEORT
Support: WAN: Art & Tech Creators Global Network / Agency for Cultural Affairs, Government of Japan / Inami-Monnai Lab, The University of Tokyo / NEW INC, New Museum