Where do you go with your beloved when you want to be intimate in a private surrounding?
You will probably go to a hotel.

Coming to Japan foreigners are surprised to find hotels which are set up only for amorous meetings. These hotels are designed in fancy ways to ensure a maximum of pleasure comfort and privacy. People wonder what might happen behind these doors, but after all a love hotel might be mainly a space of imagination and fiction.

Just fancy all the people who are going there and their "love-stories".
How do they spend the time there?
What are they doing, thinking and feeling?
Do they look around first or are they only occupied with themselves ?

So maybe the hotel is a kind of battery, charged with expectations, excitement, pleasure, realities, and after all, perhaps all the love-making has charged the rooms also with love.
But what is love? What we as lovers feel, experience, enjoy and suffer from individually is a major part of what makes us human, and as a consequence what we share with others. We long for love, but this longing is rarely completely or permanently fulfilled. The French philosopher and writer, Roland Barthes reflected on fiction and reality of love in his book "Fragments d'un discours amoureux" ("Fragments of a language of love"); he investigates the inner landscape of the loving person and describes this "journey" with literary sources.
Some of his original French words and fragmentary texts taken from this book have been placed in the rooms of a love hotel in Asakusa, 'Sunflower Hotel'; a different one in each room, where they act like lucky charms or titles for each room. For each room a fragmentary love story can be read on the website

The hotel itself can only be visited as regular customer; however this online project enables to see each room with several pictures including a panorama view on the website.

Besides the hotel and the website, ef gallery is the third gate to the project and the gallery space has been transformed into a room4love, where the visitors can exprience a room4love, read the stories and contribute their own love-stories or key words/how they met their loved ones/etc... as an email to the website and these key words will be put into a new story and added anonymously to the room number on the website. for a new story to the website.

You are invited to visit the rooms, read the stories and to contribute to room4love.

With this project an imaginary space for love will be created, where reality and fiction merge and the individual visit becomes part of a "love-fictionary".

Steffi Jüngling