It’s not uncommon to read, on a snack package, the phrase “with chocolate taste,” often printed in bold uppercase. The wording plays a subtle trick on the mind. Most people assume the product must contain chocolate. Yet a flavor is not a substance. More often than not, what we bite into carries only the impression—an illusion—of chocolate.
The same applies to color. Our brain is just as easily misled. Colors behave like flavors: they may smell—pardon… look—like a particular hue, but they are subjective sensations rather than fixed properties of the outside world. They shift with context, changing according to their surroundings. More striking still, identical colors can appear different under certain conditions, while different colors may look the same. This phenomenon is known as color induction.
Even texture plays a role. It can alter how we perceive a color’s intensity and tone. Take beer and an egg yolk: they may share the same orange hue and gradation. Yet the brain reads them differently. The glass and the liquid are perceived as translucent, so their color seems lighter, duller, more diluted. The yolk, by contrast, appears opaque, with a richer, more glossy, more solid color.
In this picture, the beer and the egg share exactly the same orange gradation.
“The Master of Numbers” is an Op Art photomosaic portrait of the renowned physicist, created from a collection of photographs of numbers. Each detail contributes to a visual exploration of mathematics, perception, and pattern. The project took me two years to complete, photographing numbers in the most unusual places and objects, and bringing them together into a single portrait.
And a little secret: tucked inside the mosaic is a tiny portrait of me and my wife—a fun, hidden signature and a personal touch.
Limited edition posters and prints are available through my online gallery.
First, observe the alignment of the red circles as they move in a straight vertical path, up and down. Then keep your gaze on one of the three Xs in the middle. What do you notice?
The red circles seem to drift away from their true physical trajectories, as if they were following the curves of the static lines. This perceptual shift is known as the “Mainz-Linez Illusion“.
When you keep your gaze on the central X, the moving dots shift into peripheral vision, where spatial resolution is limited and detail is reduced. The visual system compensates by interpolating missing information based on contextual cues and prior experience. As a result, the dots become perceptually “bound” to the nearby curved lines, as if threaded on them, and their straight vertical motion is misread as oscillating.
The Mainz-Linez phenomenon reflects a broader principle: peripheral vision is largely constructive. Under certain conditions, this predictive filling-in can also distort motion judgments in real-world tasks—such as driving—where events in the periphery may be misperceived.
My minimalist tribute to M. C. Escher: an animated “impossible waterfall,” drawn frame by frame. It’s not exactly my usual artistic language, but I had great fun creating it, and I hope you’ll enjoy watching it as much as I enjoyed making it.
As you can see, the isometric structure links impossible angles to create a continuous water channel that appears to flow upward in a loop, falling from a high point yet seemingly returning to the top.
The “impossible waterfall,” reimagined in a lavish Rococo style, rendered as a surreal illustration for a book project.
Impossible or undecidable figures have long fascinated artists, mathematicians, and viewers alike. Their appeal lies in a delicate tension: the structure appears perfectly logical at first glance, yet closer inspection reveals spatial contradictions that cannot exist in the physical world. My latest work revisits an idea I first explored in the 1990s—an impossible Rubik’s-style cube—now developed into a new series built across several stages, from hand-drawn construction to digital refinement and photographic interpretation.
The project began with a simple geometric framework—interlocking beams arranged to suggest a stable cubic volume. The challenge was to reinterpret an apparently ordinary three-dimensional cube into an ambiguous form that still appears structurally plausible. Through careful adjustments of line weight, contrast, and directional and formal cues, the cube gradually shifts from perceived solidity to spatial uncertainty, so that as the eye moves across the image, the object quietly reorganizes itself, producing a surreal perception in place of a coherent physical structure.
Here is the original version of the project, refined from my initial hand-drawn construction and carefully reconstructed using FreeHand MX
Two of the final images belong to the Op Art tradition, where sharp black-and-white geometry emphasizes visual tension and rhythmic structure. These compositions highlight the cube’s architectural clarity while allowing the paradox to emerge naturally from the viewer’s perceptual processing. The remaining two images take a different path: they present the object in a photographic setting, rendered with realistic lighting and textures.
Together, the four images form a small visual narrative—construction, transformation, and illusion—showing how a purely conceptual structure can evolve into multiple aesthetic forms. The Op Art versions focus on perceptual mechanics, while the photographic interpretations suggest how an impossible form might inhabit the physical world, even if only in appearance.
Fine art prints and canvas editions from this series are available through my official gallery shop, where each piece is produced using archival materials designed for long-term display.
Collectors and galleries interested in larger formats or special editions may also contact me directly for availability and production details. This series continues my exploration of perceptual geometry, where simple shapes become instruments for questioning how we construct space, depth, and visual certainty.
I’ve always wondered about the limits of shape and color needed for us to represent or recognize an object. Take a stemmed glass, for example. To depict it, you might need just two circles and a straight line—and perhaps a red disc to suggest the wine inside.
But we can go further: by turning it from a flat image into a 3D form with a simple rotational movement, like in Duchamp’s rotoreliefs, the object suddenly comes alive in space.
All these graphic shortcuts rely on memory. Our brains interpret what we see based on past experience, filling in missing information and reconstructing the object from just a few essential cues. This process aligns with the principles of visual perception: the Gestalt laws of closure and continuity explain why we perceive a complete glass even when much of it is absent. Minimalist perception highlights how human cognition distills visual information, showing that a few simple shapes and colors are enough to evoke a rich, instantly recognizable image.
People often ask me where the ideas for my illusions come from. The truth is, they often arrive quietly, inspired by the places I’ve visited and the cultures I’ve encountered. During my travels, it’s not unusual for me to create something that reflects the spirit of a place. Take “Seal or Bear?” for example—it came to me while wandering through northern Canada, surrounded by the vast, silent landscapes of the Arctic and the rich traditions of Inuit culture. That illusion went on to become a classic in the 1990s and even made its way into textbooks on perception.
Later, during my journey through Japan between Tokyo and Kyoto, I was captivated by the delicate balance of light, shadow, and movement in the world around me. It was there that “How Many Birds?” took shape, in the ukiyo-e style. One of my earliest optical illusions, it explores bistable perception in a playful way. Depending on your gaze, you can see four birds nestled in their respective nests with one perched on a branch—or four chirping chicks gathered around their mother. I like to think that, in that moment, the spirit of the place and the quiet rhythm of daily life found a way into the lines and spaces of the image, letting viewers glimpse more than one reality at once.
Ultimately, I am like a sponge, absorbing everything that orbits around me, all while staying true to my own style. That is simply how I work.
What strikes in the tiny space between God’s and Adam’s fingers in the Sistine Chapel is neither mysticism nor religion—it is humanity itself. Michelangelo, perhaps without realizing it, captures a simple yet profound truth: the hardest distance to cross does not depend on strength or span, but on “human will”—or its absence.
We perceive a tension in the image: God leans forward, taut and ready to give all He can. Adam, by contrast, extends his hand half-heartedly, hesitant, the finger limp and weak. That missing centimeter seems, at first glance, to symbolize free will—or the refusal of determinism: the choice to make a tiny gesture that can shift our understanding of life, to move forward with conviction, or to remain still, waiting for everything to arrive on its own.
The fresco speaks beyond faith: to moments when we could act, yet remain still. Stillness is not failure—it is awareness. Like Wu Wei (無為) in Zen philosophy, it is effortless action: a letting go, a recognition that life flows even when we do not grasp it. Free will and determinism fade into labels, defined only by belief.
That one-centimeter gulf becomes infinite. It stretches across light-years, embodying the human condition: our extraordinary capacity to feel and aspire, in tension with the world, facing life’s trials and the inevitability of our own mortality.
What is an instant—the punctum temporis—that Plato called ἐξαίφνης (exaíphnēs), the sudden? Is it a vanishing point between past and future, or the hinge on which both unfold? Plato saw it as an interruption in the flow of time, a fleeting spark where change occurs, yet which itself seems to escape duration. Augustine later reflected that the present, though indivisible, lives within us as the tension between memory and expectation.
Bergson went further, arguing that real time—la durée—cannot be reduced to a series of measurable instants. If an instant is infinitely small, it cannot be summed; if it can be summed, it is no longer an instant. Thus arises the paradox: if the present is composed of infinite instants, how can it ever be said to exist?
Perhaps time is not made of points but of relations—of movement, perception, and becoming. The instant would then be less a unit of time than a threshold of consciousness, the meeting place of continuity and change. In that sense, punctum temporis is where time reveals its true nature: elusive, dynamic, and inseparable from the act of being.
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