Brian Wood-Koiwa
Brian Wood-Koiwa was born and raised in rural Pennsylvania in the US, but knew that he really belonged in big cities - the bigger the better.
He has lived/worked and travelled around the world, in places such as Qatar, Ecuador, Thailand, Australia, and as a Peace Corps Volunteer in central Africa (training in Cameroun and Gabon and posted to the rainforests of the Republic of Congo), before settling down in Tokyo. He has been living in Tokyo for over 20 years, so his art is inspired by the juxtaposition of the ultra-modern and traditional aspects for which this megalopolis is known.
He calls his creative style “UrbanWeird”: emphasizing the phantasmagorical of the seemingly urban mundane.
Extended Artist’s Statement
My creative work reflects my interest in the concept of The City as a living being both independent of and intimately connected to The Human. Because cities are beings, they have the same complexities as humans, e.g., changing moods from melancholia and broken to proud and whimsical; in other words, wonderfully weird. One goal with my art is to convey to the viewer/reader my images/writings or take one of my Photo Explorations to experience the diverse ‘emotions’ of The City, i.e., to discover a personal connection with it. Another goal is to give the viewer/explorer/reader an opportunity to simply contemplate their place, mentally or physically, in relation to the urban environment. How do they feel/fit in with the towering scrapers, littered alleys, masses of unimaginable diverse inhabitants, and crisscrossing orderly chaos of trains, subways, and cars? Is this all alien, a fantasy; or is it just too real?
Because of my upbringing in rural Pennsylvania in the US, The City has always been a fantastical world, something so different and wonderful; a place of hardened gritty acceptance where one can be who they really are. Even though I have been living in cities for a good part of my life now, I still have that sense of living in a fantasy world where things are just weird enough to be interesting and many times disconcerting. The City is multi-dimensional, so limiting The City to just one would not do it justice. The same goes for format. I do photography and writing and am always finding ways to meld the two.
The main influences in my creative expression are photographers such as André Kertesz, Daido Moriyama, William Eggleston, and Stephen Shore, as well as writers and novelists of the dark weird fantasy subgenre of the New Weird who often set their stories and novels in outlandish decadent cities both imagined and real…ish. Thus, I constantly aspire to have my art to be ‘UrbanWeird’. The keywords I think of when being creative are "Decadence", "Banality" (making the weird mundane and the mundane weird), “Disorientating”, the Japanese aesthetic concept of "Wabi-Sabi", and of course “City” and “Weird”.
