Art is always a collaboration between the artist and the viewer. Whatever the artist paints, sculpts or photographs is just so much dead matter until it comes alive in the mind of the viewer.

What is true for all art is particularly true of the art of Jean-Claude Wouters, a Belgian artist, whose exhibition at the Marunouchi Gallery in Tokyo makes a particular appeal to the viewer's empathy, sensitivity, and ability to visualize. This is because Wouters creates images that at first sight hardly seem to be there. Yet, by some perverse rule of psychology, this seems to draw us to them all the more.

Although Wouters has a long track record as a "creative type" in a number of fields — painting, dancing, film — it is his recent work using photography that is of real interest. The well-preserved 53-year-old, who still has the spritely carriage and lithe bearing of someone trained as a ballet dancer, uses a technique of carefully re-photographing photographs under a sheet of glass, using purely natural light, before producing high-quality, selenium-toned silver prints.