Daisuke Yokota

TEIKAI (Wandering at midnight) is the second part of the TEIKAI trilogy in progress by Daisuke Yokota and AKINA.
TEIKAI is a lonesome midnight drift through the outer edges of the city exploring the human obsession of reaching for the sky, circling around industrial areas and the construction sites’ modern wasteland, where the dreams of suburbia haven’t yet been dreamt.

TEIKAI is Daisuke Yokota’s notebook of the winding path at night towards the city through secondary roads and cul-de-sac, turning the familiar into uncanny, building a parallel universe of where every-day objects retrieve the mystery of their shapes.

About the trilogy: the kanji writing of TEIKAI has many meanings. One of the them is “to linger”, to stay a bit longer. Another meaning is: to wander at midnight. When taken out of context there’s no way to tell which is the intended meaning, starting from this ambiguity of language and word Daisuke Yokota’s started working on the TEIKAI trilogy, currently a work in progress. There’s no way to know where this midnight wandering will lead.

TEIKAI (Wandering at Midnight): Best Photobook 2014 in the list of Eric Miles for Photoeye.
Best Photobook 2014 in the list of Matthew Carson for ICP International Center of Photography… (altro)

More than 40 engrossing images make up this series of grainy, black-and-white photographs by Daisuke Yokota, the first to feature his nude photography. Through a visual expression that mixes reality and fiction, an indecipherable tangle of human limbs and torsos is made eerily yet sensually tangible within the close quarters of a nondescript bedroom space. Deep shadows threaten to engulf the writhing, fleshy bodies of what seem to be a man and a woman, even as the suggested intimacy of their interaction is negated by the extreme proximity in which Yokota places the viewer.… (altro)

The images are typical night city wanderings and exhibit Yokota’s signature experimental processing techniques whilst also demonstrating unconventional shooting methods like re-appropriating thermographic and infrared cameras and rendering the images onto analog film. But overall Yokota’s experiments with extremely low-resolution cameras brings the concept of classical photography to its limits and revises the question of what photography should be. This book is produced as 2nd invited artist with Hiroshi Takizawa and Yoshi Kametani for "Berlin Residency Programme" by Kominek Books.… (altro)

A hallucinatory night walk in the outskirts of Tokyo, where sleepy suburbia emerges as dreamscape. Could this be the backdrop for a nocturnal crime scene, or a tale of irretrievable loss? For the photo essay 'Outskirts', Daisuke Yokota shot his haunting images on colour film before inverting the colours and changing them to a monochrome palette. The camera staggers around, resulting in a stream of images of trees, parked cars, and forlorn buildings. Yokota unpretentiously traverses the boundaries between the digital and the analogue, overdeveloping film, re-photographing images, and distorting them with heat, dust, or acid. Yokota's dynamic process is permeated by the spectral qualities of the medium.… (altro)