The Camera Club of New York

I am exploring physical and psychological processes of adaptation and assimilation in displacement, immigration and diaspora. How cultural hybridity occurs and what changes one’s identity and mind-set in the process intrigues me. I include myself since I moved from Tokyo to New York six years ago, and noticed that locating myself in two countries and intense urban centers keeps me in transience. I started noticing similar emotions and methods of coping by what attachments and choices we maintain belayed by what conditions items we reject. Whether successfully or not, a certain degree of my adaptation to be in the two different cultures and systems has progressed, while I have been holding and giving up my accustomed life style and mind-set, and forming new ways to adjust myself. My project is as much of a discovery process for me as it grows and adds new elements and factors.

In my recent work, I am taking pictures of scenes and events from my actual life, and of a dollhouse, which is a hybrid of a Barbie Dream house and foamcore boards. The interior is adapted and furnished with Japanese miniature items. Together, the photographs from the real life are documentary based on things that surround me and that I experience at the moment; the photographs of the dollhouse work as a reflection of things that I grew up with, or a metaphor of the reminiscence while including cross cultural dreams and their exclusion of the other. Juxtaposing these different types of photographs in a sequence, I find a feeling of disorientation and uncertainty about space and location, and wonder what is a home in the modern life.

Artist‘s Website