Duet: Asian Contemporary

Sep. 30, 2026 — Jan. 17, 2027

• Period: Sep. 30, 2026 - Jan. 17, 2027
• Closed: Mondays (except when Monday falls on a holiday, in which case the museum is open and closed the following day), New Year’s holidays(12/28-1/1)
• Admission: ￥900(720)/College Students ￥720(570)/High School Students, Over 65 ￥450(360) *Prices in parenthesis apply to groups of 20 or more. (Reservation is required.) *Free for junior high school students or younger, and holders of Japan’s disability identification cards (shogaisha techo) together with two caregiver. *Those over 65 years old receive free admission on the third Wednesday of every month by presenting proof of age at the ticket counter.

The Tokyo Photographic Art Museum is pleased to present Duet: Asian Contemporary. Featuring contemporary photography and moving image works from China and Japan, the exhibition is the second in a series that began with I Know Something About Love: Asian Contemporary Photography (2018), and was conceived in collaboration with Teng Qingyun, executive director of the Three Shadows Xiamen Photography Art Centre.

Founded in Beijing in 2007 by the internationally recognized photographer duo RongRong & inri, the Three Shadows Photography Art Centre has played a vital role as a multipurpose facility devoted to photography. A new location opened in Xiamen, Fujian Province, in 2015 and has since become a vital hub for bringing Chinese photography to audiences in China and abroad.

The exhibition presents works by six artists: Murakoshi Toshiya, Wang Tuo, Sui Taca, Luo Yang, Jiang Pengyi, and fumiko imano. Their work ranges widely, from landscapes shot as if tracing memories of a place’s past, to moving image works that retell history, photographs taken while exploring mountains and rivers with ancient literary texts as a guide, portraits of young people today, experimental images made without a camera, and collages composed of self-portraits.

A duet is, in its original sense, music performed by two people. Its structure, in which distinct voices or melodies answer one another to shape a single composition, echoes the dialogue among the artists in this exhibition. Taking the word “duet” as its point of departure, the exhibition explores the relationships and resonances that arise when works informed by different perspectives and backgrounds share the same space, bringing multiple viewpoints, cultures, times, and personal experiences into contact. We hope that encounters with the works on view will offer visitors an occasion to reflect on the richness of the photographic and moving image practices now emerging in Asia.

ARTISTS
Murakoshi Toshiya / Wang Tuo / Sui Taca / Luo Yang / Jiang Pengyi / fumiko imano

Murakoshi Toshiya
Murakoshi Toshiya was born in Sukagawa, Fukushima Prefecture in 1980 and graduated from the Nippon Photography Institute in 2003. In 2009, he founded the artist-run gallery TAP in Kiyosumi-Shirakawa, Tokyo. He received the Photographic Society of Japan Newcomer’s Award (2011) and the Sagamihara Photograph New Face Incentive Award (2015). His work is in the collections of the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others. Since 2006, he has photographed his native Fukushima on an ongoing basis, as though tracing the memories of its people and its land. Since 2011, he has traveled extensively throughout Fukushima Prefecture, seeking through its landscapes to identify changes and contradictions, as well as differences in perception and understanding. This exhibition brings together works ranging from early pieces such as timelessness to When Silence Learned to Breathe, first shown in a 2025 solo exhibition. Seen together in the same space, they also allow viewers to compare landscapes from two points in time: before and after the disaster.


Murakoshi Toshiya, from the series The Wind Prays for Sublime Stillness, 2016, gelatin silver print, collection of the artist

Wang Tuo
Wang Tuo was born in Jilin Province, China, in 1984 and graduated from the Department of Biology, Northeast Normal University, in 2007. He earned a master’s degree in painting from the Academy of Arts & Design, Tsinghua University, in 2012 and an MFA in Painting from Boston University in 2014. In 2017, he began the four-part moving image series The Northeast Tetralogy. Taking Northeast China as his point of departure, he adapts and reconfigures material ranging from historical events to contemporary incidents and folklore. By connecting the circumstances of characters separated by time and place, he exposes the fault lines in modern and contemporary Chinese history inscribed in the land. The exhibition presents two works from the tetralogy: Smoke and Fire (2018), which interweaves a man’s revenge for the murder of his mother with the experience of a boy standing before a corpse, and Tungus (2021), set in Changchun in 1948, which entwines the story of two ethnic Korean soldiers attempting to return to their native Jeju Island with that of an elderly scholar reliving his life in hallucinations brought on by starvation.


Wang Tuo, Smoke and Fire, from the series The Northeast Tetralogy, 2018, single-channel 4K video, collection of the artist, courtesy the artist and WHITE SPACE

Sui Taca
Sui Taca was born in Shandong Province, China, in 1984 and enrolled at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, in 2003. He moved to the US in 2005 and began studying photography at Rochester Institute of Technology in 2007. In 2010, he received the Photographer of the Year Award at the Lianzhou International Photography Festival for Odes, a photographic series surveying the Central Plains (the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River in northern China), a region described in China’s oldest poetry anthology, the Book of Odes (Shi Jing). The series, which required several years of fieldwork, captures moments when the language of the ancient poems and the contemporary terrain resonate briefly together within the flattened space of the black-and-white compositions.

Sui Taca, Heaven Guards, from the series Odes, 2024, inkjet print, collection of the artist

Luo Yang
Luo Yang was born in Liaoning Province, China, in 1984 and graduated from the Department of Graphic Design, Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts, in 2009. She began taking photographs while in school, and Girls, a long-term series begun in 2007 in which she captured women of her own generation on film, brought her international attention. In 2019, she began work on Youth, the subjects of which are young Chinese people born in the late 1990s and 2000s. The same year she received the Jimei × Arles Women Photographers Award. In 2024, she presented Diaspora Birds, which documents the identities and experiences of Asian emigrants living in Europe and elsewhere. The exhibition presents three series, Girls, Youth, and Diaspora Birds, in which people appear as living presences, irreducible to any preconceived image.


Luo Yang, San 2, from the series Girls, 2026, chromogenic print, collection of the artist

Jiang Pengyi
Jiang Pengyi was born in Hunan Province, China, in 1977 and graduated from the Beijing Institute of Art & Design in 1999. In 2014, he completed graduate studies at the China Academy of Art. He received the Tierney Fellowship Award at the First Annual Three Shadows Photography Award in 2009, the Jury Grand Prize from the Société Générale Chinese Art Awards in 2010, and the Aletti ArtVerona Prize for Photography in 2011. His practice explores the material nature of the photographic medium and the expressive possibilities of its processes. Dark Addiction, featured in this exhibition, was made with a cameraless technique in which the trails of firefly bioluminescence are recorded directly onto film.

Jiang Pengyi, Dark Addiction 1H43’24”, 2013, inkjet print, collection of the artist, ©Jiang Pengyi, courtesy of ShanghART Gallery

fumiko imano
fumiko imano was born in Hitachi, Ibaraki Prefecture, in 1974 and spent her early childhood, from age two to eight, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She moved to the UK in 1997. After studying fine art at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London, she graduated from London College of Fashion in 2001, having completed its fashion styling and photography course. Questions surrounding identity led her to begin taking self-portraits, and she has since produced a body of collage works in which two photographs of herself are joined to create portraits of imaginary twin sisters. le fumistol, shown in this exhibition, was produced at Le Bristol, a luxury hotel in Paris. imano made the work in 2021, while quarantined at the five-star hotel during the COVID-19 pandemic.

fumiko imano, our first dinner spaghetti/paris/2021, from the series le fumistol, 2021, photomontage (chromogenic print), collection of the artist, ©fumiko imano

Organized by｜Tokyo Photographic Art Museum operated by Tokyo Metropolitan Foundation for History and Culture
In cooperation with｜Three Shadows Photography Art Centre
Supported by｜Corporate Membership of the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum
Curated by｜Ito Takahiro (Tokyo Photographic Art Museum), Teng Qingyun (Three Shadows Xiamen Photography Art Centre)
Curatorial cooperation｜RongRong & inri

*Please note that the details of this project are subject to change due to various circumstances.