Nested Structure

Exhibition: Eclectic Chinese Homes, Yu Ogata and Ichiro Ogata Ono, Zen Foto Gallery, Tokyo, 11/5-11/22 2014, A frame that represents the construction site The photographs converted into fresco are enclosed in an original frame built to represent a steel support and a mould veneer used when pouring concrete into formwork, and that is because the buildings photographed had been constructed using steel frames and concrete, which came to prominence in the beginning of the 20th century. By inserting the pictures in a real frame that looks like the construction site, the time inside the photographs moves towards "a small dimensional slides, a world on the opposite side". Photographs in a nesting boxes structures Thus, those frames become embedded in a nested structure, in a mechanism that presents the farms and shopping districts of China in a process of repetition recalling Matrioska dolls. The reason why we use this structure of boxes fitting one inside another is that we aim to visualize the propagation of forms accompanying the spreading of culture inside the globalization of the present age visible. Exhibition The transformation of the house created by photographers, architects and contemporary artists Ogata Ichiro Ono and Ogata Yu have been bound together by photographs and essays in the publication “Our Eclectic Tokyo Home”, which we want to commemorate with the opening of this exhibition. In their quest for the figure of a home brought forth by the clash of different cultures and the threat of nature, the couple has been never-endingly shooting at the edges of the world: in their Tokyo home, images collected in China, Namibia, Mexico and many other places keep on proliferating while changing its shape in terms of structure, interior and model railroad. The works displayed in this exhibition are a series of photographs taken in Southern China, in farms as much as in the downtown. In every one of these houses built around a hundred years ago, Chinese traditions and American culture fight against each other and, with their abandoned state since the age of Communism, offer a scenery that resembles the set of a movie. In the framework of the gallery space, the photographs are enclosed like a set embedded world, expressing the eternal chain of images that an ever-moving culture bring into people’s everyday lives.