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Tokyo Nude, 2020
von • by Rumi Ando

www.rumiando.com

Rumi Ando has tidied up Tokyo: the Japanese photo artist has air-

brushed out all visual disruptive factors such as billboards, elec-

trical installations and window openings from her landscape-for-

mat city portraits. She thus shows her adopted city stripped bare

and undisguised and exposes the actually rigid and static struc-

tures of a place that otherwise always seems to be in perpetual

motion. Each of the photographs from the series Tokyo Nude thus

draws its very own, almost ornamental image of Tokyo, in which,

due to the almost two-dimensional way of representation, colour-

fully mixed urban volumes depict a calm, two-dimensional tex-

ture. Ando’s colourful abstraction of the (urban) landscape can be

interpreted as a reference to the art of Yamato-e painting, which

has characterised Japanese pictorial compositions since the early

Middle Ages. And yet the urban patterns evoke above all critical

questions of our present and our future: what kind of city would it

be if there were no longer any visible communication? If all en-

trances and exits were closed and no human interaction could be

experienced? If people would no longer desire material functions?

These are the questions Ando, who graduated from the Depart-

ment of Intermedia Art at Tokyo University of the Arts in 2010, ad-

dresses to the viewers of her fictional Tokyo dystopia, which has
now also been published as a brochure. It is not surprising that

the idea for this emerged in 2020, at the height of the pandemic

events in Japan, when the ideals of communal coexistence truly

disappeared behind smooth façades for quite some time, and the

idea of the end point of urban civilisation seemed to have come

within reach. Thus the pastel-coloured pictures represent an aes-

thetic document of those days.