“TOKYO TRANSPARENT BOUNDARIES 001”, a solo photography exhibition by photographer Yu Suzuki, will run from Wednesday, October 28th through Tuesday, November 3rd at BEHIND the GALLERY.

After studying architecture, he turned his attention to the phenomena, experiences and historical events that are born out of cities, and the buildings and architecture within them, and started to question the very nature of viewing (i.e. immersing oneself in) these elements through the medium of photography.

The color photographs featured in “TOKYO TRANSPARENT BOUNDARIES” express the “borders” found within the city of Tokyo captured by an 8x10 large-format camera. Today, borders are a continual source of conflict both domestically and internationally. A single line drawn on a map leads to walls and fences being built up in reality, as the landscape transforms into something different from what it was before, and after these boundaries are formulated, the two divided parties exist thereafter as if they are of a completely different nature. Fascinated by the divisions that take place after boundaries have been created, he began exploring the ways in which borders manifest themselves in as well as influence the real landscapes of his home, Tokyo.

It is said that in the island nation of Japan, surrounded on all sides by the ocean, people only have a value sense of international borders. However, the reality is that there are still boundaries and borders that overlap in layers almost endlessly within our daily lives. In a car on a highway that continues off into the horizon, the voice of the navigation system and the signs on the side of the road alert you to the fact that you have crossed a border that you cannot see, and you realize that boundaries have historically been delineated on the basis of a former states of affairs, and you discover that the lines artificially drawn in the landscape are boundaries inherited from the past. In order to capture the memories of the historical, multilayered boundaries and the places where they are engraved, Suzuki decided to use an 8x10 large-format camera.

Taking advantage of the unique capabilities of the large format camera, he adjusts the focus while placing it on these borderlines to create images that appear slightly different from the landscape that we see with our own eyes. The distortions that exist in his photographs provide an opportunity for us to think about how we have shaped the landscape and what the act of drawing a line on a map and creating divisions truly means.

Even in the year 2020, the question of boundaries continues to lurk in Tokyo, a city that is undergoing a dizzying cycle of scrap and build.Eugène Atget, who once captured the city of Paris through the eyes of an observer, pointed to a photograph of himself in an exchange with Man Ray and said:

“Ce ne sont que des documents, des documents que je fais.”

“These are simply documents that I make.”

This is the first in a series of photo exhibitions by Yu Suzuki that aim to document the city of Tokyo from a new perspective of “boundaries.”

A series of photo exhibitions, TOKYO TRANSPARENT BOUNDARIES XXX, that aim to document the city of Tokyo from a new perspective of “boundaries.”