Image: Tokyo Photographic Art Museum
‘Reassembling: Japanese Emerging Artists vol. 23’ will run from September 30, 2026, through January 17, 2027. The exhibition focuses on how artists take existing memories, materials, technologies and contexts and reconstruct them into new images.
The museum describes photography and video as media whose meanings can change through editing and context, sometimes evoking memories or records that never existed.
One installation, being shown in Japan for the first time, uses blackboards as supports for screen-printed fragments of a school building, addressing the time accumulated in schools. Image-generating AI is treated as a ‘metaphysical camera’ and deliberately misused to question the invisible systems that govern seeing and believing.
Another new installation uses stop-motion animation made with self-built devices and tools to explore how images emerge; public production during the exhibition will present both the completed video and the process through which the work is made. A further installation uses live-action footage, computer graphics and AI to construct a fictional city and the society within it.
The Tokyo Photographic Art Museum has held the ‘Japanese Emerging Artists’ exhibition continuously since 2002 to support creative practices that challenge the possibilities of photography and video, identify artists with future potential and provide a venue for new creative activity. The public programme includes five talks pairing exhibiting artists with a curator, art critic, philosopher, filmmaker or sociologist: Sayuri Ichida with Jin Motohashi on October 4; Aru Nomura with Aomi Okabe on October 18; Taro Karibe with Kazumi Shimonishi on November 1; Mugi Hashimoto with Koichiro Tsujikawa on December 13; and Asako Fujikura with Kazumasa Nango on January 10.
