ART PLATFORM TOKYO @ ANA InterContinental Tokyo proudly presents the 16th exhibition ‘Body, et cetera’, a three-artist exhibition featuring Junko Hirano, TADA and Aiko Yuno.

Through his artwork, TADA investigates what photography really means – the ultimate question for many photographers. In the show, he presents works from Body, et cetera, a series of photos taken at the old National Stadium shortly before it was demolished. Just like portraiture, TADA claims that there needs to be no reasoning or excuse for wanting to keep record of things that will cease to exist. Having snapped various parts of the stadium without being sentimental, he says his fascination lies not so much in the subject – but rather in the changing perceptions by the audience with the passage of time.

A year and a half after TADA took the pictures, Junko Hirano, who uses mixed materials to create her unique world of Japonesque, began shooting photos at the same place which then turned into a lush meadow. Where the National Stadium stands was once a place for hunting, reposing the souls of the dead after the great famine, and military parades. Using traditional technique called urauchi (technique to layer papers), she superimposes the image of changing landscape onto pictorial record of the place from decades ago. The work from her series Genius Loci (Spirit of Land) portrays layers of memories from the past embedded in the site.

Having studied sculpture at art school, Aiko Yuno, an emerging artist living and working in Kyoto, knows well about the sense of weight or texture of the human body. And yet, she depicts it as a silhouette, hardly giving out any hints of its sex, race, posture, or expression. By randomly choosing images from media, repeating the process of applying materials and scratching them off, she erases the characters from the motif. What’s left is a shadow-like image, her own self inspecting her inner self. As the only artist depicting human body in this show, she, too, portrays the invisible world.