Chino Otsuka is one of four AIMIA Photography prize finalists. Otsuka was born in Tokyo, Japan and now works in London,UK. She received a BA from the University of Westminster and an MA from the Royal College of Art. She has exhibited in the Netherlands, United Kingdom, South Korea, Finland, the United States, Sweden, Germany, China, Japan, India and Canada. In 2012 she had a solo show at the Huis Marseille Museum of Photography in Amsterdam.
Chino Otsuka’s work is largely about displacement. As a Japanese child she relocated to the United Kingdom. This occurrence created vibrations that have rippled through to every aspect of her current work. Most notably, the photo series Imagine Finding Me assembles old photographs of herself and photo-stitches new photographs of herself into the scene, creating a digital composite, and invariably presenting a future Otsuka with one from her past.
Her work investigates the aptitude and/or ineptitude for photography to conjure memory, and to allow one to mentally time-travel through imaginative space to the moment the image was taken. It beckons two questions: how necessary is the accuracy of photography to hold on to the details of a memory, and also how accurate can our memory ever truly be? The work then becomes an exploration of the construction of memory.
To look at more of Chino Otsuka’s work go here.
To see the other finalists and cast your vote go here.
-Rachel MacFarlane
