„From the drifting islands„ represents the situation of Tokyo after the earthquake in Japan.
Since that day, surprising disperse from the authorities and the center is silently going on in the depths of this big city. We no longer believe in any official authorities.
On the other side, it seems that people now feel that things after ‚3.11‘ are different from what they were before, although we are leading as quiet a life as before. We, perhaps, have a bad premonition that full-scale calamities will start to fall on us in no distant future. Although the tragedy of ‚3.11‘ is still under way, we have been threatened by the shadow of ‚x.xx‘, which is the date of another disaster that will hit Tokyo some day in the near future. For the time being, everything seems to remain as it has always been, yet we cannot deny the intuition that something is different. In this pending situation, we have started to drift with no stable center.
_
Toru Ukai (鵜養透) graduated from the University of Tokyo, the faculty of literature, Japanese literature studies.
In 1998 Toru was awarded with the encouragement prize in 7th „New Cosmos of Photography“. In 2000 he took part in the photography exhibition „LOVE & POWER Borderless World“ in Tokyo, Hiroshima and Sendai.
From 2002-2006 a series of Toru’s photographs and essays were published in the magazine of NHK Publishing, Inc. In 2005 Toru’s work was shown in the solo exhibition „From the Terminal Station ～ Guangzhou Railway Station ･ 1997“ in Tokyo, and 2011 in the solo exhibition “TOKYO/SHANGHAI Between heaven and Earth” in Shanghai.
For more of Toru’s work please visit
→ www.flickr.com/photos/toru-ukai-new
–
