City View , 2003 - Light, Aluminum, Shadow - Permanent display at the 2nd floor of Nanba Parks Tower, Osaka, Japan. Commissioned by Nankai Railways Inc. Description: The numbers scattered on the wall, lit from the right, cast a silhouette of a woman.

Kumi Yamashita’s an extremely fascinating artist from Japan. She works mostly on installation pieces that’re constructed by using a host of obscure materials to trace figures in the most unlikely ways. In it, she questions all our expectations, by challenging our perceptions of predictable relationships between solids and their shadows. For example, on the wall, illuminated by a single light source, we can see an arrangement of numbered 3-d blocks. These appear to be scattered haphazardly on the wall, however, this is certainly not the case. Yamashita has carefully arranged these so that each casts a particular shadow which, when taken with all the other precisely placed objects, amazingly adds up to the illusion of a lifelike form of the human body. Incredible stuff. For more info about her art, visit Yamashita’s site.