Portraits Of Jennie By Yasushi Rikitake.108 May 2026

Unlike sharper digital portraits, .108 employs what fans call "lacunar blur"—a technique where the subject’s face is 70% resolved, with the left eye (always the left) dissolving into negative space. Jennie’s gaze in this portrait is not meeting yours; it is looking slightly past, over your right shoulder, toward something that does not exist in the room. This mimics the film’s time-displaced heroine.

"Portraits Of Jennie By Yasushi Rikitake.108" first appeared at the Venice Biennale (2022) in the "Spirits and Spectres" pavilion. It was displayed in a completely dark room illuminated by a single flickering LED designed to mimic a 1940s cinema projector.

Critics were divided. Artforum called it “pretentious sentimentality wrapped in academic mysticism.” But Frieze magazine declared it “the most genuine depiction of ghost love since Goethe’s Erikönig.” Portraits Of Jennie By Yasushi Rikitake.108

In November 2023, the piece was purchased by a private collector in Kyoto for $4.8 million USD—then immediately donated to the Yamamoto Museum of Spectral Art, where it currently holds a permanent rotating display (the work is so sensitive to light that it is only shown for 15 minutes every 108 minutes).

Why the suffix .108? In Rikitake’s own artist statement (published in the Bardo Journal of Transpersonal Art, 2021), he explains: Unlike sharper digital portraits,

“In Buddhism, there are 108 earthly desires. In Hinduism, 108 is the number of wholeness. In the human body, we have 108 marmas (energy points). But in love, 108 is the number of breaths before a ghost forgets your name.”

For Portraits Of Jennie By Yasushi Rikitake.108, the number refers to the layer count. Using a technique he calls kaze-nagashi (wind-flowing), Rikitake would apply oil paint, let it dry for 12 hours, then use a solvent to pull the pigment vertically downward—like rain on a windowpane. Layer 108 was the final "anti-layer." He did not add paint; he removed it. “In Buddhism, there are 108 earthly desires

He took a surgical blade and scraped away the varnish over Jennie’s heart. The canvas below is raw, unprimed, and stained with ghostly outlines of previous Jennies. It is an act of negative creation: the most important part of the portrait is the absence of paint.