Brian Wood-Koiwa
I was born and raised in rural Pennsylvania in the US but knew that he really belonged in big cities—the bigger the better.
I eventually settled in Tokyo and have been living here for over 20 years. I am the co-founder of the monthly Writing the City workshop series here in Tokyo; author of the serialized UrbanWeird dark fantasy novels Flowers Wilt, Weeds Thrive and Conspiracy of False Citizens; literary and technical editor; and founder of Tokyo Photo Explorations.
My writing and photography are thus inspired by this wonderfully eccentric city and “The City” in general. I call my creative style “UrbanWeird”: emphasizing the wonder-inspired weird of The City.
Want to know more about UrbanWeird and my influences? scroll down.
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 writing and photography is to celebrate The City and all its push and pull of weirdness and banality. Through my urban writing workshops with my fellow urbanophile Joy Waller and my Photo Explorations, I hope for the reader/viewer to experience the diverse ‘emotions’ of The City, i.e., to discover a personal connection with it. Another goal is to give people an opportunity to simply contemplate their place, mentally and 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, 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 on my creative expression are writers and novelists of the dark fantasy subgenre of the New Weird who often set their stories in outlandish decadent cities both imagined and real…ish and the good ole’ classics (which are quite weird in their own way). The influential photographers are André Kertesz, Daido Moriyama, William Eggleston, and Stephen Shore. Thus, I constantly aspire to have my art to be ‘UrbanWeird’. The keywords I think of when being creative are "Decadence", "Banal/Mundane", “Defamiliarization” (making the weird mundane and the mundane weird), the Japanese aesthetic concept of "Wabi-Sabi", and of course “The City” and “Weird”.
