A theatre of the world, a forest of photographs and a mountain of faces. Ryu Ika, born in Inner Mongolia, won the 21st 1_WALL Grand Prix in 2019 and held the solo exhibition The Second Seeing, a bold installation of prints and monitors that filled the space with gazes and asked where the viewer stands. The book develops that show and invites the reader into a theatre made of pages with the feel of a comic: a varied cast mixing humour and unease, reversals of front and back, layers and deviations from them, and sudden faces whose pressure cannot be escaped, printed, folded, eyes closing, reorganised like organs. People are always watched, and a world that is not watched does not exist; Ryu says she splits an eye of others inside herself that keeps watching her, a second observation answering the idea of a second sex. The photographs were taken in Inner Mongolia, where she grew up, in Japan and in Paris, where she studied, and in Egypt, about half of them in circumstances devised by the artist and edited with negative-positive reversal, superimposition and emphasised noise.