Located in Ginza, a prime district in Tokyo – Nagakin Tower is a 13 storeys Tower designed by Kisho Kurokawa in 1972. The tower has set the aesthetics typical of architectural dystopias: Pure í70s heroic brutalism with a vision of alienation.
Today, the tower has fallen into disrepair. I grew obsessed with the tower & its madly visionary architect – by bringing the future into the present. And the tragedy of not able to dictate the evolution once human/economics imperfection intervenes.I am attempt to construct an imaginary Kafkaesque narrative on someone (The architect) being trapped in his own tubula-rasa, trying to escape for the crumbling meta-textual stage of his own creation.
Artist Shyue Woon
Shyue Woon is trained as an architect and interested in the intertwining of built environment with different disciplines in art. During the day, he uses architecture to turn aspiration and dreams into constructible reality. By night, the camera becomes his tool to deconstruct and reverse reality and spaces into fiction and dreams.His work previously been exhibited in Odessa (Ukraine), Cambodia, Malaysia and Singapore; his works were selected for +50, a collective for Singapore’s Photographers; and to be part of ìThank you, Mr Leeî (2015), a book tribute to late LKY. [Official Website]