PARCEL is pleased to present Behind the clouds , a solo exhibition by internationally acclaimed Japanese photographer Sohei Nishino.

Since 2003, Nishino has continuously developed his Diorama Mapseries, in which he walks through cities on foot, photographs them extensively, and then meticulously cuts out and assembles each image by hand, allowing a single map—one shaped by memory—to emerge. Alongside a group of works that trace nearly twenty years of Tokyo’s transformation through a fixed, observational perspective, this exhibition introduces a new series, FL350, which takes “clouds,” seen through airplane windows, as its central motif.

The methods developed in the Diorama Mapseries are grounded not merely in photographic expression, but in a physical engagement with movement and memory. The act of touching, cutting, and assembling tens of thousands of photographs—fragments of memory—functions as a process through which memories of travel are reawakened and anchored in the present. For Nishino, this process can be understood as a continuation of the journey itself. The landscapes that emerge as single maps are accumulations of movement and time, revealing layers of shifting consciousness, as if the city itself were breathing.

After relocating his base to Izu, Nishino began to incorporate clouds into his work, prompted by the everyday sight of Mount Fuji partially obscured by cloud cover. Drawing inspiration from techniques such as suyari-gasumi found in traditional Yamato-e painting—where landscapes are perceived through veils of mist—he developed a renewed interest in manipulating depth and viewpoint within the image. In Tokyo 2024, the city is perceived through clouds, prompting a renewed inquiry into the relationship between photography and painting. This line of inquiry quietly resonates with Nishino’s own formative experiences of travel, which begin with the act of crossing the sky.

The new FL350series consists of works reconstructed from photographs Nishino took over a period of approximately ten years while traveling by airplane for his artistic practice. These images were not originally taken with the intention of becoming artworks. Looking back, however, Nishino came to recognize them as layers of memory accumulated alongside bodily movement, gradually taking shape as a unified series. For Nishino, who lives in an island nation, each journey by plane beyond the clouds becomes “an initial ritual for measuring distance from the world.” When the clouds part, the land below reveals itself —places where the lives of people in some distant country undoubtedly unfold. To gaze upon such scenes is to shape both the beginning and the end of a journey, allowing the notion of “travel” to take form. Nishino has described sensing this each time he moves through the sky. This sensibility offers a way of reimagining the world not as something distant and separate from oneself, but as something interconnected, like the surface of the earth itself. Having constructed the pictorial form of each work in the Diorama Mapseries in response to the contours of specific places, re-envisioning the earth’s surface as a single map can be understood as an entirely natural extension of his practice.

This exhibition brings together the Diorama Mapseries created at ten-year intervals—Tokyo 2004, Tokyo 2014, and Tokyo 2024—alongside Tokyo 2003, an early, previously unreleased work. Tracing nearly two decades of artistic development, the exhibition follows the deepening of Nishino’s perspective—from the aerial, bird’s-eye view of early works such as Aerial Stroll, to the viewpoint of everyday life, and finally to the painterly perspective of “beyond the clouds” in his most recent works. These overlapping layers of multiple viewpoints render the city as a single, immense living entity, while also bringing forth Nishino’s own self-portrait, glimpsed through the city. Titled Behind the clouds, this exhibition offers a space to experience how Sohei Nishino’s photographic practice has expanded its perspective and continually recalibrated its distance from the world, guided by the intertwined themes of city, travel, memory, and clouds. We invite you to encounter Nishino’s multilayered landscape world as it unfolds beyond the clouds.