In 2008 Lieko Shiga announced herself on the Japanese photography scene with two books, Canary and Lilly, and the Ihee Kimura Photography Award. In 2009 she moved to Kitakama, a coastal town in Tohoku, where she worked as the town's official photographer, documenting festivals and official events and recording an oral history of the region, and Rasen Kaigan collects the new body of work made there over more than four years in concert with the local residents. Its images call to mind surrealism, land art, happenings, sculpture and the presence of Japanese earth spirits. Shiga made each work as if her photography were inseparable from her own body, breathing in the air of Kitakama as deeply as possible and then breathing it out slowly, to reveal traces of physical activities connected with the land. Kitakama was devastated by the tsunami of March 2011 and the book acknowledges the disaster, but it is far from a book of tsunami photographs: it shows her continuing engagement with the questions of what photography is as a medium and what it means to live and express oneself on land. The book accompanies the exhibition at Sendai Mediatheque.