Shiga had dropped out of a course in professional photography in her homeland because it focused purely on technical matters and talked only of black-and-white but, taking a trip to England, she discovered a different approach. She returned to London in 2002 with a place at Chelsea School of Art. Working alongside painters, sculptors and film makers, she felt much more at home but, without any technical guidance, she had to learn “how to invent for myself”. Unable to communicate properly, she made sense of this new and alien environment by choreographing scenes with the people she befriended living in Hackney. Unable to afford the expensive papers she wanted to use to make prints, she experimented, developing the techniques that would form the basis of her unique approach.

She got her negatives developed at Boots then took the prints to a nearby off-licence to make five-pence photocopies in black-and-white. Back at home she would work on the copies, making small cuts and shining lights through, then re-photographing them. Eerie and phantasmagoric, the resulting images seemed to describe her sense of isolation and unease and, encouraged by the results, she began to push it further, forcing herself to face her fears and communicate with strangers to photograph everyone in her block.

She stayed in London for five years and the work she created was published as a book, Lilly. It now seems a little clunky in parts compared to her next title, Canary, but it taught her that using such processes provided a means to an end – a route to the unexpected. She made Canary during subsequent residencies in Brisbane, Australia, and Sendai in northern Japan, where she became more interested in location and place, using a framework similar to psychogeography. On arriving in each town she made questionnaires, asking local residents to identify the “darkest” and “brightest” spots around, then she plotted them out on a map and visited them, figuring out connections between people and places.

“The particularities of those places are not all that important,” she told Ashley Rawlings in an interview translated into English for Tokyo Art Beat. “Rather, I will go through a variety of processes that end up leading me to a place, and it’s the experiences that I have along the way that matter to me. I think those experiences have a profound connection with the history and societies of those places.”

Often, she would instigate some sort of action with people at the place, which might or might not appear in the photograph. It’s all part of the process, she says, describing the almost “religious”, out-of-body feeling she experiences as she finds “the moment of unpredictability”. She describes visiting one of the “bright spots”, a Buddhist temple, for example, and how she collected a mass of discarded flowers, took them up a mountain and dug a hole to bury them in. The photograph shows the empty hole before the flowers were buried.

Her approach to her career is equally unconventional. Since winning the ICP Infinity Young Photographer Award last year, she has kept a low profile, saying she’d rather remain independent than join a gallery to sell her work. Right now she’s making new work back in Japan, living in a small village of 400 people. “I’m not in a hurry,” she says.

Visit www.liekoshiga.com.