“Concentratevi sull’essenziale e tutto andrà bene.”

“Concentratevi sull’essenziale e tutto andrà bene.”
“Focus on what’s essential, and everything will work out.”
2022
Inkjet print, frame

At the end of the summer of 2022, Yamaguchi visited the Venice Biennale—often called the Olympics of the art world—for the first time. It is a stage that every artist dreams of standing on. After spending three days viewing exhibitions, he stopped to rest at a small Chinese restaurant where he received a fortune cookie containing an unexpected message in Japanese: “Focus on what’s essential, and everything will work out.” Setting this photo as his phone wallpaper, he decided to revisit the same restaurant during each Biennale, held every two years, to try his luck again. However, when he returned to Venice in 2024, he found the restaurant had closed down.