Cities are always “amplifying” themselves repeatedly. They emerge and disappear as they continue to integrate themselves. With a camera in hand, I walk through specific cities to take photographs-- those of birds' eye views, of views captured by looking up above me or views from various locations along the road.
Thereafter, referring to the map, I put together on various canvases all the "fragments" that I have captured, so as to reconstruct my memories to enable myself to render into images the specificity of the respective cities and the appearance of "the present" whose glimpse the cities have given me. By doing so, I try to express again the geographical representations by using the photographs that have captured the specific things and events that are completely different from the symbolic representations on maps. This is my attempt to express the appearance of the cities by integrating my personal experiences and memories. What results is not at all a map to convey precise information, but the record of how I, as a human being, have walked through their streets and how I looked at those streets. Along with being the representation of my awareness, it is that of the appearance of the respective cities as the epitome of their vitality. I try to capture the cities, not necessarily as the entities consisting of the symbolized information and material buildings, but as the fresh and organic Life that is the accumulation of the experiences and activities or the history or memory of the people who live there.
What constitutes the important element of the Series, Diorama in Map, is the constant "movement". The series is the work that is the deposit of my experiences and the time I have spent in encountering the various phenomena as I move through a certain place. At the same time, by using all my methods of photographing as the elements that constitute a map, I try to actualize in the form of a bird’s-eye-view map, my awareness of the world which spreads out before me, that is, immediately before my eyes.
A great many processes are included in the process of producing this work. I can say that each of these processes constitutes a part of my journey through the cities. The reason for that is my belief that photographs are not completed at the moment they are taken, but are completed in the process of recollecting the memories thereafter by confronting them again. I believe that what results from my confronting these enormous number of photographs, and actualizing again in the form of a map by integrating them, is my personal portrait, as well as my representation of the appearance of a specific city whose glimpse it has given me. Moreover, by emphasizing "repetitions" in this series, I try to see the transformation in my personal way of responding to cities and that of my way of communicating them, not to mention the transformations of the cities as structures. I do so by looking at one and the same city at a specific time, (I produced "Tokyo" in 2004 and once again, produced the same in 2014).
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