A Hollywood lighting crew get lost in Japanese suburbia and decide to set up on an anonymous street corner or in someone's back yard? However he gets his orange and purple skies, hyper-green hedges and rabbit-in-the-headlights surburbscapes, Tomoyuki Sakaguchi's long exposures of street-lit suburbia have a great sense of missplaced drama.
Zhang Xiao was born in 1981 in China's Shandong province. There is some great work on his website, in particular his series on the demolition linked to the infamous Three Gorges Dam.
Thanks to Mrs Deane for switching me on to Youngsuk Suh's work. I am particularly enjoying the Wildfires series and, in the light of Errol Morris's recent post on photographs and the text that accompanies them, the way that the captions make you read these images.
I just came across the website of Hin Chua, a Malaysian-Australian photographer living in London. There is a bunch of interesting work there, although I found the After the Fall series to be his strongest (with a preference for Part I). It is pretty ambitious ("a meditation on that altered yet fundamental bond, examining the precarious ever-shifting dynamic between [...] man and nature") and not quite focused enough, but there are a lot of strong images there and I prefer too much ambition to too little. I also enjoyed They called me a corporate whore, probably because I also used to work in the City as an investment banker and it is something that is nice to be able to look BACK on.
During my exceedingly short trip to Tokyo earlier this month, a friend of mine took me on a whirlwind up-and-coming-photography tour of Tokyo. First stop was at the G/P Gallery, in the new NADiff a/p/a/r/t art complex in Ebisu (which incidentally has an excellent art bookstore). They had a small solo-show (14 prints) of the young photographer Taisuke Koyama's entropix series. I had made a mention of Koyama's work in the piece I wrote for Images magazine last year highlighting some of the Japanese photography on show at the 2008 edition of Paris Photo. I didn't get to see enough of his prints at the fair, but I found the couple of images that I did see interesting.
Entropix is a series of visual fragments, seemingly haphazard abstractions that still retain a link to their subject (paint peeling, pink fabric, tarmac, sheet metal). The images are highly detailed, feeling like microscopic, molecular studies of the surfaces of the city. Koyama's compositions are both strong and simple, and they retain an instinctive energy reminiscent of Eggleston's shotgun approach. The (digital) prints are good, although I prefer the smaller prints to the larger edition (1.2 x 1.8m), which I found diluted the impact of the images a bit.
I ran into Koyama later on that evening at a discussion organised by Akira Rachi at CAMP in Hacchobori (more on this later) where he was presenting entropix and had a chance to chat briefly to him. He will be coming to Paris Photo with G/P again this year so this will be a chance to see more of his work. And if you don't feel like waiting until then, a catalogue of the series is also available from G/P. One to watch.