#illusion series — KG+ 2024

Shown at KG+ 2024, the open satellite program of Kyoto's annual Kyotographie photography festival, this piece extends the #illusion series into a context explicitly framed by the photographic image. Ueda's source — Instagram's brief blurred loading placeholder — is itself a degraded photograph, a JPEG approximation generated by the platform's compression algorithm before the full image resolves. Silkscreening it onto mirror brings two reflective surfaces into contact: the screen's deferred image and the literal mirror that returns the viewer's face. The KG+ context aligns her concerns with festival audiences attentive to photography's contemporary instabilities — distribution, compression, screen-mediation — rather than to silver-print or darkroom history. Within Ueda's chronology, the 2024 KG+ presentation marks a continued public sharpening of the #illusion project after its earlier 2022 iterations, and shows the silkscreen-on-mirror technique stabilising as her central material vocabulary rather than a one-off experiment.