WALLFLOWER by Brandyn Liu

Throughout my life I have always been deeply fascinated by Japan. From receiving my first Playstation as a child to watching movies such as Fast and Furious Tokyo Drift, I grew up envisioning Japan as a crowded futuristic playground.

In 2018 I finally got the chance to visit Tokyo for the first time. I wanted to take this opportunity to transcribe the pre-constructed image of this city I had pieced together into photographs. Visiting Tokyo validated much of what I had expected the city to be, however, I found myself documenting a different angle of Tokyo than I had originally set out to capture.

The show title Wallflower comes from the informal definition of a person that shies away from a crowd or a social activity. While the complexity of the city and its densely packed streets did excite me, I found myself drawn to the outliers. This show is about the quiet spaces and residents that preferred the sidelines - a reflection of my own experience visiting this city as an outlier myself.