As we grow up we master language as a tool for dealing with the world around us. The baby looks up from his crib at the sky. The brightness, the blueness and the whiteness is made into words like "the sun," "the sky" and "the clouds." In this way we take the flood of sunshine and differentiate it into a harmonious scene. Language is convenient for organizing this world, but once you have come to rely on language it is difficult to regain that innocent way of seeing. Aki Tanaka's work takes us to a time before that reliance on language.
Her photographs help us to rediscover that we are not looking at "things," but rather at the light that is bouncing off of things. 
The frame is blurred, the colors melt into each other, and at times we cannot grasp what the subject is. 
As we search her photographs for a reference point we ask ourselves, what could this be? Then we realize that perhaps it is unnecessary for us to try to establish the frame of the object, or attempt to match it to our catalogue of verbal knowledge. In Tanaka's photographs reds, yellows, greens, and even the blue of the sky, appear like brightly colored candy balls. Transparent leaves, and branches of trees appear as weird insects or birds. We see the flood of light before the naming of these objects, and the possibility emerges that by using a completely different kind of "language" we can discover a scene that is completely different from us. These red and gold trees liberate our vision to a myriad of possibilities. Each of the photographs is a unique window and casts a soft light onto memories and feelings that have been sleeping in the subconscious. 
Your own story is accompanied by the feelings and memories brought out in the images. "That light I saw on that day long ago! " In addition to these strange three dimensional effects, the viewer's line of sight is drawn into the photograph's background creating a sense that you are peering into your soul. In this way Tanaka's works are like a psychological exam.
If one stares at the the blurred images, one loses track of the distinction between the works and the self. In her previous collection entitled "Sunshine Pulse," she explored an insecurity or restlessness. In it she suggested the beauty of an unreality that could evoke evanescence or even madness. I suppose that this is not something that was deliberate on her part, but rather is something that I extracted. Her new works have a decidedly positive thrust when compared to the former, with their cold denial of the world (even though the subject was cherry blossoms!) Of course it is not necessary to interpret this. Rather it is acceptable to only touch on this flood of light like the pure presence before language.
