The camera obscura is an optical device that was occasionally used by Dutch painters of the 17th century to help them achieve a superlative level of technical proficiency. Literally meaning "darkened chamber" in Latin, it is a room with a small hole in one wall that lets in light from outside and casts an upside-down image of whatever surrounds the chamber on to a screen inside. The three-dimensional scene from outside thus loses a dimension in its reproduction on the inside, making it easy to trace and suitable for picture making.
Like the camera obscura, Yukio Fujimoto's (b.1950) most recent installation "Shadow-Exhibition Obscura" at the Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art, concerns the subtraction, and also the addition, of dimensions to the experience of art.
Museum visitors do not usually get to be touchy-feely with the objects around them, but this exhibition, which is shown annually, originally catered specifically to the sight-impaired. Now in its 20th year, this show retains visual games such as Fujimoto's "ECHO (WATER)" (2001), in which an LCD display of the word "echo" is capitalized and reflected in water in a way that seems to defy physics, but has also expanded its range of artworks, paying more attention to touch and sound.