DEN Gai

• TOP >
• Residency Program >
• Invited Creators >
• DEN Gai

DEN Gai

Participating Project	Local Emerging Creator Residency Program
Activity Based	Tokyo
City / Place stayed	Tokyo
Period	2026.9- 2026.11

Purpose of the residency

The purpose of this residency is to reconsider, through photography, the relationship between Tokyo’s layered histories and the institutions shaping contemporary urban life. Focusing on Koto Ward, I will collect prewar, wartime, and postwar photographs, maps, and local archives while documenting everyday infrastructures such as parking lots, convenience stores, and police boxes. By bringing historical images into contact with present landscapes through collage and installation, I aim to reveal fissures between destruction and reconstruction, memory and forgetting, publicness and control. Through archival research, field observation, image-making, material experimentation, and dialogue with residents and fellow participants, I will develop photography as a medium that generates new relations between image and language, while rethinking the relationship between artistic practice and critical inquiry.

Plan during the residency

• Collection of historical materials and archival photographs, along with local memories and oral accounts
• Investigation of the spatial distribution of contemporary urban infrastructure
• Comparative analysis of historical maps and the present-day urban environment through walking, repeated photography, and field notes
  
• Production of collages combining contemporary photographs, archival images, and maps
  
• Experiments in the spatial arrangement of images and language, followed by a public presentation of the research and resulting works
  

Creator Information