石川幸史

Koji Ishikawa

Since 2017, Koji Ishikawa has repeatedly traveled around Tokyo, photographing wasteland left behind by the times, scars left by natural disasters, and strange scenes around military bases and suburbs—sights that contrast sharply with the redeveloped city center—in a road movie style.

Focusing on the mythical effects of Americanization that influenced postwar Japan, this work explores American images that have been imitated and reproduced, capturing how they have been oddly transformed to suit the local climate and topography. The result is a perspective that wanders between reality and fiction, revealing various complex, entangled relationships.

Through this fieldwork, Ishikawa reconsiders modernization and ideology, visualizing the historical reality that is omnipresent in our daily lives and the differences and similarities between the global and the local. At the same time, he ironically raises the issue of a dystopian world in which the boundary between reality and fiction has become blurred due to conflict between economic globalization and political nationalism.