Duet, six voices for two countries

Two different voices answering each other until they form a single melody. This is the image chosen by the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum for Duet: Asian Contemporary, on view until 17 January 2027 on the second floor of the Ebisu museum, bringing together six Chinese and Japanese artists working across photography and video. It is the second chapter of a series launched in 2018 with an exhibition devoted to love, and it is the result of a collaboration with Teng Qingyun, executive director of the Three Shadows Photography Art Centre in Xiamen. Founded in Beijing in 2007 by the photographer duo RongRong & inri, the centre has become one of the leading hubs for photography in China and since 2015 has had a second base in the Fujian city. The curator for the Tokyo museum is Takahiro Ito. The works on show address memory, place, identity and the very nature of the image. Toshiya Murakoshi, born in 1980 in Sukagawa, has been photographing his home region, Fukushima Prefecture, since 2006, and after 2011 travelled through its landscapes to capture their changes and contradictions in black and white. Wang Tuo, born in 1984 in Jilin Province, presents a chapter of The Northeast Tetralogy, a video cycle that interweaves historical events, news stories and folk legends to reveal the fault lines of modern history in northeastern China. Sui Taca, also born in 1984, shows Odes, a photographic journey through the Yellow River plains celebrated in the Classic of Poetry, the oldest collection of Chinese verse, a series now also held in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum. Luo Yang, born in Liaoning, is internationally known for Girls, a long-term portrait on film of women of her generation, which she has followed with Youth, devoted to young Chinese people born between the late 1990s and the 2000s. Jiang Pengyi, born in 1977 in Hunan, works on the materiality of photography: in Dark Addiction he records directly on film, without a camera, the light trails left by fireflies. The line-up is completed by fumiko imano, born in 1974 in Japan, raised partly in Rio de Janeiro and trained in London, who for years has created self-portraits in the form of photomontages in which she appears alongside an imaginary twin sister.