Toru Ukai
Stationery Mindfulness
Originally, Toru Ukai had been engaged in marketing in a publishing company and he started to photograph in 1997. At that time he was posted to the Guangzhou office, southeast of China. In those days Chinese peasants had poured into big cities, like an avalanche, and such peasants, on the scale of tens of thousands of people, had also lived in front of the Guangzhou station. Toru took their photos every night and after going back to Japan he was awarded a prize in the 7th “New Cosmos of Photography”. His photographs and essays were published in the magazine of NHK Publishing, Inc. and were shown in some exhibitions in Japan and China. Now he tries to represent the social and mental situation of Tokyo after the major earthquake. Here we can see some of these works in Tokyo.