Paul Cupido
Paul Cupido graduated with honors from the Fotoacademie Amsterdam in 2017. Since then, he has published various artist books, including Searching for Mu (2017), Continuum (2019), and 4 a.m. (2021) — each one in collaboration with graphic designer Akiko Wakabayashi. Cupido’s work has been exhibited widely, including Paris Photo, Unseen Amsterdam, and the Nordic Light Festival. In 2017 he won the Hariban Jury Award. > Read more
The photographic work of Paul Cupido revolves around the principle of Mu, a philosophical concept that could be translated as ‘does not have,’ but is open to countless interpretations. Mu can be considered a void, albeit one that holds potential. Cupido’s ongoing photographic and cinematic experiment, Searching for Mu, is at once a personal and universal odyssey of our fleeting existence in relation to the profound emotional experiences of love, time, and death. Cupido’s photographs allude to transcendent reflections of the soul and the intermingling of the microscopic and macroscopic realms.
“I aim to engage with the world with wide-open senses. My work is about the magic moments of life, as well as its inconveniences. I want to take pictures while forgetting about the process of photography, until I’m saturated with an existential sense of life. Every step I take begins with the notion of ‘mono no aware’: the transience of everything, the gentle melancholy of things, being sensitive to ephemera.” — Paul Cupido
