Masaki Asakawa

Masaki Asakawa’s digitally re-assembled urban imagery stems as much from architecture and urban theory as from his interest in mediated images and spatial relations. Appropriately he credits Cubism’s strong influence – evident in accumulated images of the same object from different angles – as well as postmodern architecture’s tendency to deconstruct familiar forms. His sense of space and structure, meanwhile, attests to his Japanese artistic training, as does his virtuoso manipulation of digital photography and imaging. Isolating, disassembling and repeating geometric patterns, architectural details and colorful forms from the urban fabric, Asakawa has evolved his own brand of digital graffiti.

His work is completely bound to the urban ecosystem, but is also playfully critiquing its harsh gridwork. The absurd repetitions of façades, cars, advertising surfaces, beams and pillars evokes an overwhelming post-urban dream where the stuff of cities is piled high, freed from the constraints of physics, the limits of vision or imagination. Asakawa’s cacophonic fantasy cityscapes thereby propose different ways of seeing and relating to urban space.