In Postcard Ciné #48 “The ships’ signals look like accent marks”Gozo Yoshimasu turns a simple act of looking into a meditation on perception, memory and attention. Filmed from a hotel window at dawn, the camera initially faces the ocean beyond the fishing port of Ayukawahama in Ishinomaki, Miyagi Prefecture. The establishing shot is one of soft abstraction: shimmering points of light flicker across the water, refracted and out of focus. As the camera attempts to adjust, it zooms out and scans the rocky shoreline, revealing the contours of the coast before slowly returning toward the distant fishing vessels whose lights punctuate the horizon.

The process of focusing becomes the work’s central drama. Yoshimasu repeatedly attempts to bring the lights into clarity, zooming closer and closer to the ships. The effort is only partially successful. The image oscillates between sharpness and blur, caught between his desire and the technological limits of the camera. This unresolved state produces a visual liminality, hovering between presence and disappearance.

Accompanying the footage is Yoshimasu’s improvised narration. Part observation, part poetic reflection, he describes the distant lights as ‘voicing marks,’ imagining them as punctuation within a larger rhythm. Their intermittent glow becomes the work’s poetic prosody; pauses, accents and breaths within an unfolding sentence. With Franz Schubert playing softly in the background, Yoshimasu muses on the relationship between poetry, mark-making and music, suggesting that each is an attempt to capture the rhythm of the mind itself. Abruptly, Yoshimasu hands the narration to ‘Marylya’ and cuts to footage of a tv or computer screen. Here we see a close crop of trees at night in stormy conditions while the elusive and spectral voice of Marylya sings a haunting romantic aria in English.

The work emerges from Yoshimasu’s extended stay in Ishinomaki in 2019 during the Reborn Art Festival, nearly a decade after the devastating 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. From the window of the ryokan overlooking the Pacific and Mount Kinkasan, the artist wrote daily poems for those lost in the disaster. Postcard Cine continues this diaristic practice. Hovering between mourning and creation, the work inhabits a poetic threshold and an intermediate space akin to the Buddhist notion of bardo, where memory, landscape and language remain in quiet, unresolved tension.