Water Lily

A photographic series of Kazuo Ohno, the pioneering Butoh dancer, titled Water Lily, taken at Studio Asbestos in Tokyo. The title is drawn from one of Ohno’s performance works and is echoed in his delicate, expressive hand gestures captured in the images. The photographs focus on his stillness and transformation of movement into gesture, where the body becomes almost suspended in time. The water Lily motif introduces a layer of symbolic ambiguity, often associated with purification, liminality, and states between life and death. In this context, it can also suggest a quiet, purgatorial space—where presence and absence coexist within the same fragile frame.