大坂 紘一郎
郭 昭蘭
Piercing Through A Porous Archive
Hikaru Fujii
Fujita Tsuguharu
Peng Ruei-lin
For its 12th edition, Ginza Curator’s Room presents its first-ever co-curated exhibition, welcoming Osaka Koichiro, director of the project space ASAKUSA, and Jau-lan Guo, Associate Professor at Taipei National University of the Arts.
This exhibition begins with the photographs of Peng Ruei-Lin, a photographer who holds a significant place in the history of Taiwanese art. Contemporary artist Hikaru Fujii builds upon Peng’s photographs, transforming them into new works that explore the layers of memory and interpretation. Alongside this, the exhibition features a wartime painting by Fujita Tsuguharu—created during the war and long considered lost. Through this juxtaposition, the exhibition invites reflection on the latent possibilities that archives hold.
2025.6.6 Fri. — 2025.6.28 Sat.
Closed on Sunday
10:00 — 18:00
Shibunkaku Ginza
Ichibankan-Building
5-3-12 Ginza, Chuo-ku, Tokyo 104-0061, Japan
Nomura Securities Co.,Ltd.
Minister of Culture, Republic of China (Taiwan)
Yoshiko Isshiki Office
Osaka Koichiro, Jau-lan Guo
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 Hikaru Fujii (b. 1976), 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.
Osaka Koichiro
Curator, Founding Director of project space ASAKUSA since 2015, and curatorial research lab, 0-eA Society for the Curatorial, since 2023. Curated exhibitions include “Imperial Ghosts in the Neoliberal Machine (Figuring the ICA)” (e-flux, 2019) and “Curse Mantra: Jusatsu Kito Sodan” (Para Site Residency, 2019). Pursuing a PhD from 2025 in Comparative Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore.
Jau-lan Guo
Independent curator and Associate Professor, Taipei National University of the Arts. Jau-lan GUO teaches modern and contemporary art, art history, and curatorial practice. Her research interests revolve around the issue of artistic migration, circulation, art historiography, and how exhibitions make history.
In On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Brief Moment in Time (MoNTUE, 2021), a recent collaboration with artists Michael Lin and Lee Ambrozy, she explores the possibilities of trans-historical display as expanded field of art historiography. In Score: Moving from “Art as Method” toward “ALIA as Method” (KdMoFA, 2020) she rationalizes and visualizes interdisciplinary exchanges while reintegrating a ‘score’s’ capability of mobilizing time and space into the subject of ‘ecology-form’ in regional art. Guo also translated Boris Groys’ Art Power into Chinese (Artist Publishing, 2015). Her essay on art historiography This is (not) Photography: An Assignment Given by Peng Ruei-Lin is published in Hold the Mirror up to His Gaze: the Early History of Photography in Taiwan (1869-1949), and Pathways and Challenges: Art History in the Context of Global Contemporary Art on Curatography.org.
Jau-lan GUO is the organizer of the 2022 Reconstructing History of Art in Taiwan Symposium – Horizontal Art History: Perspectives from Taiwan.
Hikaru Fujii
Artist. Hikaru Fujii utilizes diverse media, including installation, film, and workshops, to bridge art, history, and society. His practice is rooted in extensive research and fieldwork, often focusing on specific historical moments and social issues. Through his work, he critically examines both contemporary and historical crises, as well as structural violence, exploring their impact and significance on human and more-than-human worlds alike. His work has been exhibited at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo; M+; National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA); Centre Pompidou-Metz; Kadist (Paris); and Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), among others. He has also participated in numerous international art festivals, including the Asia Pacific Triennial (2021) and the Rencontres d’Arles (2024). He was awarded the Tokyo Contemporary Art Award 2020–2022.
Fujita Tsuguharu (Léonard-Tsuguharu Foujita)
1886–1968
Yōga painter from Tokyo. After graduating from Tokyo Fine Arts School, Foujita moved to France where he created the signature “milk-white” skin with delicate lines, earning him high recognition in the Paris art world. He returned to Japan temporarily and was recommended as a member of Nika-kai art association and the Japan Art Academy. After the World War II, he acquired French nationality by naturalization, baptized and changed his name to Léonard Foujita. He was awarded the Asahi Prize and received the Legion of Honor.
Peng Ruei-lin
1904-1984
Taiwanese photographer Peng Ruei-Lin was born in Hsinchu, Taiwan in 1904. In 1928, citing “the lack of photography in Taiwan” and through the encouragement by Kinichirō Ishikawa, he went to the Konishi Professional School of Photography (today Tokyo Polytechnic University) to receive photography training. In 1931, Peng Ruei-Lin returned to Taipingding (Taiheichō), Taipei and opened the “Apollo Studio”, which became a high-end photo studio in that area. The studio was also the base for him to nurture young photographers. Influenced by the trend of Japanese art photography, Peng Ruei-Lin suddenly received a conscription order from the Japanese army in 1938 and went to Guangdong to serve as an interpreter. His Guangdong Album became one of the few documentary photography works in his career. During this period, in addition to taking photos with a Kodak the Pearl camera, Peng Ruei-Lin also produced and published sketches of battlefield scenery.
On the eve at the outbreak of the Pacific War, Peng Ruei-Lin had close contacts with Vietnamese Prince Cuong De of the Vietnam National Restoration League. In addition to being a commissioned photographer for various activities of the Vietnam National Restoration League, Peng Ruei-Lin is both the photographer and the subject in these photos. If the Vietnamese-language broadcast mission that Cuong De accepted from the Taiwan Governor-General’s Office at the end of 1939 was a kind of southward broadcast through sound, then the group photo taken by Peng Ruei-Lin that still remained, was another kind of broadcast that is silent and muted.