
Courtesy of Ellen Peng
Ginza Curator’s Room #012
Piercing Through a Porous Archive
June 6 – 28, 2025
Shibunkaku Ginza, Ichibankan-Building, 5-3-12 Ginza, Chuo-ku, Tokyo
For their 12th edition, Shibunkaku’s Ginza Curator’s Room presents their first-ever co-curated exhibition, welcoming Osaka Koichiro, director of the project space ASAKUSA, and Guo Jau-lan, Associate Professor at Taipei National University of the Arts.
In a private album by Taiwanese photographer Peng Ruei-lin (1904–1984), fragments speak more through absence than assertion. Annotated in Japanese during his 1938 journey as a military translator accompanying imperial forces, its pages—some with missing entries and blank spaces—obscure histories, tracing structures of silence, withheld views, and a hesitance to be fully exposed. Through their critical recomposition by contemporary artist Fujii Hikaru, presented alongside a wartime painting by Fujita Tsuguharu (1886–1968), the exhibition threads a fleeting line of dislocated gazes and shifting allegiances that run across the Pacific Rim—from Japan to Taiwan, Vietnam, Singapore, and the United States. Photography here does not merely preserve the past; its porous archive—when touched by light—casts new shadows, exposing the limits of vision and the ruptures within the medium itself.
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