"Ouroboros in Crimson" Artwork - Limited Edition of 3

I have spent most of my adult life in Tokyo — more than twenty-five years since moving from Russia’s Far East, where I was born close to Japan’s border. That proximity shaped something in me before I could name it: an orientation toward the Pacific, toward a world that felt both near and entirely other. I came to art late, through photography. My formal training began at the Kyiv School of Photography, and studying there during the war — with my own biography placed uncomfortably between geographies — became one of the most clarifying experiences of my life. Later, my mentor Dmitry Bogachuk of Galerie Formes in Paris shifted the way I understood images: not as isolated works, but as parts of a sustained body of thought unfolding over time. What I make now exists between photography and something further. I begin with personal images — surfaces, light, reflections, and fragments accumulated across Tokyo — then carry them through a long process of digital transformation. Generative tools provide a beginning, not a conclusion. The real work happens in revision: adjusting texture, pressure, rhythm, density, and silence until the image no longer feels generated, but inevitable. My current series, Sphere, counts to 108 — one work for each bead on a Buddhist juzu, each bead traditionally holding a human passion. I am not a Buddhist practitioner, but the idea of completing a number as an act of release has stayed with me since the first sphere. Each work is a circle made to feel three-dimensional through texture and color alone. Some are serene. Some resist. The works are printed on museum-grade archival paper and mounted under 5mm museum-quality acrylic glass. The acrylic is not simply protection; it becomes an optical layer. It changes how color is read, deepens the surface, and becomes part of the image itself.