In Michael Kozlowski’s new work, Bokeh, the edges fade, blur—soft light meeting frosted Perspex. Beneath, the shapes stir but do not surface. What lies there is another world, a place where borders dissolve, where what’s real feels half-seen, masked. A lamp hums low, a sculpture breathes slowly. The scene shifts, but only in shadows.

Bokeh names that uncertainty: the way light refracts, the way a moment escapes, the way a life slips past, a gentle blur around the edges. In photography, it’s the deliberate absence of clarity, the soft surrender of sharpness to light’s trembling weight. But in Kozlowski’s hands, Bokeh becomes something more—a window into the in-between, where boundaries of form and space refuse to settle. It is not about focus, but what is lost in the act of focusing— and the loss feels personal.

This is where the Japanese concept of yūgen enters: not as a counterpart but as a shadow, a submerged partner. The writer Hiroaki Sato asked Doris Bargan, a German scholar of Stanley Elkin who turned to classical Japanese literature when she read The Tale of Genji, what yūgen evoked for her: "...there is the funeral scene of President Roosevelt, with his coffin on an old rattling cart drawn by horses, and then the horse without a rider next to the coffin. And the silence, with only the unadorned sounds of this cortége." This is exactly the quality found in Bokeh-- something haunting, stark, and yet achingly delicate. Something spare and yet unabashedly maximalist—loss held close, but not named outright.

These works ask us to consider what is omitted, what floats just beyond the frame. It is an artist’s sleight of hand, drawing our attention not to the subject but to its absence. The poet Ishii Tatsuhiko calls yūgen “artistically contrived ambiguity,” and this work operates in the same space. The viewer is never sure: is this the foreground or the background? Where is the weight? What is the object, and what is its shadow? There is a tension here that remains unresolved, and in that unresolved space other presences softly enter: a landscape disappearing under water, a house sinking into dusk, a small, quiet haunting.

The landscape of Kozlowski’s Pacific Northwest undoubtedly influences this uncertainty. In the great cedar forests of Washington and Oregon, everything is layered. There is no beginning and no end. Life merges with decay, light fades into mist. Kozlowski’s sculptures take on this quality—they are layered, organic, diffuse, dense and yet alive with the weight of their own disappearance. They are not meant to be understood all at once. Look too closely and you’ll miss them. Like the light through the cedar branches, these works are best approached obliquely, through circumnavigation, their shapes emerging only as one moves around them. To confront them head-on is to lose their meaning. They refuse confrontation. They ask for patience.

Patience, and yet there is also a command for performance; for the viewer to move while the work stays still. The viewer is not allowed to remain passive. They must shift in the same way the work shifts and refuses to be pinned—to become part of the piece, circling it, tracing its shape. This is how Kozlowski pulls us into the rhythm of the work. In the ancient art of Noh theater, a haven for yūgen, the slow unfolding of a gesture or a poem leaves the viewer grasping at meaning, only to find it lingering later, like the aftertaste of a dream. Faubion Bowers said that the “curious enjoyment” of a Noh performance is found not in the moment but in the memory of it. Bokeh carries that same strange afterglow. The lamps, the sculptures—they are haunting not because of what they are but because of what they refuse to be. They leave us unsettled, a flicker of light just out of reach.

Perhaps it is odd that something proceeding from a computer, or even from a serialized thought process, could yield works so nuanced. But to think this way misses the essential humanness in repetition. For Kozlowski, process came early, deeply. His father, a printer, understood seriality, the slow solitary unfolding of form through repetition, through time. As a child, Kozlowski spent hours on the floor of the print shop, drawing serialized narratives on copy paper that he felt slowly built a world. Later, in film school, his head turned unexpectedly toward the screen—not for the finished scenes, but for what happened in the margins, in the errors and glitches of the machine. Feeding footage into a computer, he watched as the images shuddered and broke apart, lines of feedback skittering across the screen, color and pattern stretching out into something that almost-but-not-quite erased the narrative. It was a revelation.

What was the narrative? Could it not be this? Could the dissolution of the image itself carry meaning, become its own kind of performance? In those early moments of discovery, the lines of feedback seemed to resist the certainty of plot, unraveling it into something far more alive, more elusive. And this aliveness—this tension between control and chaos, between what is fixed and what trembles at the edges—has defined his practice ever since. For Kozlowski, this is the true definition of interactivity—not merely in pushing buttons or manipulating objects, but in how the art requires the viewer to navigate it, to be implicated in its unfolding. Time is not just a backdrop but a key player, a force that shapes the experience moment by moment, making the viewer an active participant in the narrative—or the anti-narrative—that emerges.

In fact, one could say that yūgen is woven into the very idea of technology. What is technology but the human attempt to harness the untamed, to press nature into shapes we can understand, manipulate, perfect? Tools to control what refuses control— what actually controls us. But yūgen, as Hiroaki Sato describes it, is the luminous side of nature—the space between the visible and the invisible, tinged with the sadness of knowing that, in every grasp to hang on, something slips away. In the pursuit of mastery, there is always a loss: the more we claim to possess, the more we feel the pull of what lies beyond possession.

But perhaps it’s this tension that Kozlowski’s work wants us to feel—the friction between mastery and uncertainty. To create is to collaborate with chaos, to accept that the order we impose is temporary, fragile, always teetering on the edge of what cannot be known. In the flicker of light, in the blur of edges, there is a kind of sadness. The sculptures hold within them a longing for control, but they are resigned to their ephemerality. They hover, like ghosts, between clarity and dissolution. The beauty of yūgen lies here too: in restraint, in what is left unsaid. Bokeh offers us that same quiet truth— that to touch the world is to know that much will remain untouched, and that there is beauty, even joy, in what we cannot hold.

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