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“Japanese Houses” by Toshihiro Komatsu (b. 1966, Japan) is a photographic series that for over two decades has captured “families” and “houses” in the areas the artist has been based, including Shizuoka, Tokyo, Shiga, and Kyoto. In the works, the “houses” are allocated as the “faces” of the residents as a photo-montage/photo-collage. The series is created with the awareness of typological photography, typified by August Sander’s portraits and photographs of water towers by Bernd & Hilla Becher. Through collecting photographs of certain kinds of subjects, Komatsu examines the distinctions among images and what the accumulation of multiple images visualizes. The title of this exhibition, “Topophilia,” is a term coined by Chinese-American phenomenological geography researcher Yi-Fu Tuan (b. 1930) who studies the concept of the “emotional relationship between humans and the environment.” The term heavily influenced Western researchers as a concept that derives the “essential human-environment relation” from the perspectives of architecture, urban planning, nature, and the environment, while it was also translated into Japanese as an “affection for a place,” and has become well-known within the nation as the word to express the depth of the potential consciousness people have about “places.” This series—being shown in Tokyo for the first time in 17 years—connotes varied scales embedded within itself.
