Seen: Tokyo Debugger
Who: Shinya Arimoto 有元伸也 website
Where: Zen Foto Gallery, Roppongi, Tokyo (map)
When: January 14 - February 20, 2021 (Open 12-7pm. Closed Sun. & Mon.)
To me Arimoto’s incredible Tokyo Debugger series of insects and creatures found in Tokyo’s western wooded hills is “new” but I realized I’ve been sharing images of it since October 2013 ( and in October 2014 , September 2015, and July 2020).
This 2021 show at Zen Foto is commerates their publication of his Tokyo Debugger book (Available at shashasha). The gallery’s website provides a statement by Arimoto on this series- I think it conveys that Japanese perspective towards nature- one that’s a mixture of animsim and realism.
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“Many people have questioned me why I would create a group of work focused on bugs, since I have mainly focused on my work on portraits of human beings for more than 20 years. However, I have previously written in the statement of previous work “Tokyo Circulation” that “the dense sprawl of Tokyo is an ecosystem with magnificent circulation”.
That concept originated from the idea that If honeycombs, a meticulously calculated structure created by bees as a living creature are a part of nature, then cities created by the living creature called human beings should also be a part of nature. I once said that my previous work and this work “belong to the different sides of the same coin”, but for example, just as a piece of blank paper has neither a front or a back, the human world and the bug world are also inseparable. I call them “mushi senpai” (“bug senior”) with all my respect as those little ones have been living on this planet since the dawn of time.
Also, I named this work “Tokyo Debugger” for two reasons, one with the simple meaning of “searching for bugs in Tokyo” and the other as a metaphor, questioning whether “debugging (removing)” in the history of the earth would happen to the bugs or to the human beings.
Perhaps the human world is insignificant compared to the history of the bug seniors, and to them we may be an ephemeral existence that suddenly appears and quietly disappears in their world.”
——Shinya Arimoto