ZEN FOTO GALLERY

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 House”, 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 pattern. 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 Chinese boxes, expressing the eternal chain of images that an ever-moving culture bring into people’s everyday lives.