2022-2024
Tokyo After Dark explores the hidden currents of desire and intimacy flowing through the city’s most enigmatic districts. The series investigates spaces designed for nocturnal transgression—from Love Hotel Hill’s illuminated facades to Golden Gai’s intimate alleys, Ni-chōme’s historic gay quarter, and Kabukichō’s red-light thoroughfares.
These distinct neighborhoods operate as pressure valves within Tokyo’s rigid social structure, creating zones where strict codes of behavior temporarily loosen. The work examines how darkness and neon work in tandem, simultaneously concealing and revealing moments of human vulnerability while artificial light transforms anonymous streets into stages for carefully negotiated encounters.
Through this nocturnal topography of desire, the series reveals how these districts serve essential social functions, providing vital space for expression and connection outside mainstream Japanese society. Like inverse mirrors of daytime propriety, these areas reflect complex relationships between visibility and invisibility, restraint and release, isolation and intimacy in contemporary urban life.
