Yuko Kamei marrying bodies, spaces, movement and stills  [read more]

Yukihiro Taguchi finds a dark to stick the light in [read more]

When Yu Ogata and Ichiro Ogata Ono are not busy building buildings they photograph buildings others have built [read more]

Hiroshi Sugimoto seeing with ancient eyes [read more]

A new photography museum designed by Hiroshi Sugimoto at the foothills of Mt Fuji [read more]

Leiko Shiga’s brother in his boxer shorts learning to play piano, sans piano [read more]

With his unique brand of uncomfortable hilarity, Tatsumi Orimoto’s Oil Can will be performed in Sydney this May [read more]

Yuichiro Tamura tells found stories with screen grabs from Google Maps Street View [read more]

Shiga Leiko’s images reconsider the medium of photography a distorter, rather than documenter, of reality [read more]

Having explored the temporal through the medium of photography for over three decades, Hiroshi Sugimoto has concluded that time is an exclusively human construct, which no other animal has any sense of [read more]

As part of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s ongoing inquiry into the scientific and philosophical implications of the medium of photography, a Lightning Fields installation is planned for the Biennale of Sydney this May [read more]

The Japanese word for “photograph”, shashin, comes from sha (“to reproduce or reflect”) and shin (“truth”). The act of photography, then, consists of taking the truth and making a copy of it on a surface. [read more]

Continuing until the end of this week at the Centre For Cosmic Wonder Tokyo: original prints from the Cosmic Wonder Free Press Sunday Edition [read more]

Chatting with Fumiko Imano about the desire to self-duplicate, the nature of photography, the relationships between fashion and art, and how she came to be her own favourite subject [read more]

“We find beauty not in the thing itself but in the pattern of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates.” (Jun’ichirō Tanizaki) [read more]

At any moment in time there are hundreds of thousands of people moving at speeds of tens of thousands of kilometres an hour in the sky above us [read more]

Knarf’s unique inkjet printing and sticky tape style of ‘photograffiti’ is scattered all around Tokyo, a city notoriously strict on anti-graffiti laws and noticeably sparse on street art [read more]

Fans of the legendary poster designer Tadanori Yokoo should be making the most of cheap flights to Japan this October. [read more]

A new exhibition has just opened at 21_21 Design Site (a foundation that was established by Issey Mikaye and friends in 2007), showcasing 100 objects by product designer  Naoto Fukasawa, accompanied by images of his work from photographer Tamotsu Fujii [read more]

Whether he’s documenting explosions, dwelling on the lonely silence of mining towns, playing with the reflections of artificial light on water at night, or taking us to into dark voids beneath the city, Tokyo photographer Naoya Hatakeyama’s atmospheric images always present built environments that are utterly devoid of human life. [read more]

“To be there where I think I am not, to disappear where I think I am, that is what matters.”

Like her fellow Japanese self-costuming photographic artists Yasumasa Morimura and Tomoko Sawada,  Kimiko Yoshida’s work shows that art is about transformation and photography, in particular, is a medium of performance. Because her bodily decoration and physiognomy are so motley and elastic she would be beyond recognition in her hundreds of self-portraits, were it not for their uniformly square, front-angle head-and-shoulders format. But then, ‘self-portrait’ isn’t really the right term; these are not images of herself but of costumes; fantasy selves have swallowed her up completely. [read more]

Remember the start of Spirited Away when the family stumbles upon the crumbling, abandoned amusement park and the dad explains how scores of theme parks were built in Japan in the 90s, and then left to rot when the economic bubble burst? Now also faced with the GFC, Japan is scattered with a higher number than ever of decaying man-built sites reminiscent of more affluent days. Locating an eerie beauty in these deserted locations is the ongoing photographic documentation of Shibakouen Hamutaro [read more]

In this 1996 series of self-portraits Yasumasa Morimura transported his body into various lusted-after silver screen goddesses, to both comic and tragic effect. Having previously made himself into darlings of historical western art like the Mona Lisa,Vermeer’s girl with the pearl earring and Renoir’s busty barmaid, his fascination with iconic female identities provides a driving force for continual self-metamorphosis. With his ongoing exploration of the body, gender, race, identity and self-representation, it’s little wonder Morimura has identified so strongly with Frida Kahlo, who was the catalyst for his most recent series [read more]

Takashi Homma wields his camera with the exactitude of a surgeon. Tokyo’s dusky suburbs, rigid parking lots, discarded McDonald’s cups, miniscule rooftop gardens and shadowy shopping window reflections all yield to his crisp gaze. His Tokyo Children and Tokyo Teens – dubbed ‘homo transcendants’ in an essay by po-mo maverick Douglas Coupland – are placed on par with the city itself; its living embodiment, inscrutable, chilly, endlessly intriguing. Interestingly, the doe-eyed child offered up as ‘My Daughter’ in a series is not in fact Homma’s, but a friend’s – is fiction or form here stronger? [read more]

The highly stylised Kabuki-esque aesthetic and ghostly soundscape of this 1964 cinematic gem create a dream-like state that makes no attempt to be realistic. Director Masaki Kobayashi spent five years in preparation before he started shooting; painting and building the elaborate sets almost single handedly and renting an aircraft hanger to use as a sound stage. The opening credits establish the unforgettable restrained beauty that runs throughout the four stories which make up the portmanteau film [read more]

“Small changes in point of view can lead to big changes in consciousness. I think this is the role of photography and it’s what makes photography interesting.”

Naoki Honjo’s parochial birds-eye landscapes and cityscapes appear at once familiar and removed, simple and disorienting, real and fake. The Tokyo-based photographer ingeniously manipulates lighting, scale, perspective, focus and colour to invoke a sense of small-scale falseness about the environments we live in [read more]