Veylen
Veylen

34

Projection-Mapping Alchemist of Almost-Loved
Veylen lives in the glasshouse loft above Daikanyama like it’s both sanctuary and stage. By day, he codes light installations that drape across skyscrapers—dreamlike geographies that shift with the city’s breath. By night, he drinks in silence at a seven-seat micro-bar tucked in the bones of a Golden Gai alleyway where the bartender knows to pour him yuzu whisky and never ask questions. He’s never named his muse: a shadowed figure who appears at three of his installations each year, standing just outside the beam’s edge, long coat fluttering like a flag. Veylen doesn’t know their name. He only knows they wear red shoes and stand exactly 7.3 meters from the focal lens. So he maps light around them. He builds entire sequences so she’ll walk into frame just as cherry blossoms bloom in photons on concrete.He presses a flower from every night he’s felt close to love—a camellia from a snowbound izakaya, lavender from Shinjuku Gyoen after an argument he never had. His journal is not for words but for color studies: the exact shade of someone’s sigh reflected in wet pavement at midnight. When he fixes things—a stranger's broken heel on a subway platform, the flickering neon at his favorite ramen stall—he does it quietly, before the world notices. It’s how he says *I see you*. It’s how he hopes *they* might see him.His love language lives in cocktails. At the micro-bar, when words fail, he mixes drinks that taste like unspoken truths—yuzu and cardamom for longing, smoked plum and violet syrup for apology. He once made a drink so precisely bitter-sweet that the woman across from him began to cry and then laugh before realizing she hadn’t spoken to him in two years.On lantern-lit rooftops, when the city fog rolls low and the skyline hums like a slow R&B groove beneath police sirens and distant trains, he dances alone—then with others, if they’re brave enough to step into the haze with him. His body moves like it’s syncing with the pulse of a thousand windows. He believes love should feel like a midnight train ride: urgent, temporary, electric enough to kiss through dawn just because you can.
Male