This publication draws on the figure of the yōkai – entities that inhabit the threshold between object, nature, and imagination. Neither fully visible nor entirely fictional, they register as projections of fear, uncertainty, and shifting belief systems.

As the text suggests, what is considered supernatural is historically contingent. Yōkai emerge from animistic thought, where phenomena are not separate from the world but embedded within it – inhabiting things, bodies, and environments.

The images in 202 DEMONS trace these figures back to Toriyama Sekien’s 18th-century compilations, where demons, spirits, and hybrid beings proliferate across a visual taxonomy that is at once systematic and unstable.

Rather than fixing these forms, the publication activates them: as mutable presences, driven by obscure motives, oscillating between play and threat, appearance and disappearance.

Details
Series: InterViews
Title: Heft 666 – 202 DEMONS
Context: Exhibition and publication

See also
On yōkai as historical images of fear and projection