The Tokyo Photographic Art Museum in Ebisu is presenting "Duet — Asian Contemporary", a group exhibition bringing together six photographers and filmmakers from Japan and China. The show, which runs until 17 January 2027, is the second instalment in a series that began in 2018 with "About Love: Asian Contemporary".

It was jointly organised by Takahiro Ito, a curator at the Tokyo museum, and Teng Qingyun, executive director of the Three Shadows Photography Art Centre in Xiamen. The title borrows from music, where a duet is a piece performed by two voices, and the curators worked in the same spirit, developing the show by responding to each other's proposals. Four of the Chinese artists are being introduced in a Japanese public museum for the first time.

The six participants are Toshiya Murakoshi, Wang Tuo, Ta Ke, Luo Yang, Jiang Pengyi and fumiko imano. Murakoshi, from Sukagawa in Fukushima prefecture, has photographed his home region since 2006, and the show places pictures made before the 2011 earthquake and nuclear disaster alongside work from the years that followed, asking what a landscape photograph reveals and what it leaves out.

Wang Tuo, who won the M+ Sigg Prize in 2023, shows two films from his Northeast Tetralogy, Smoke and Fire from 2018 and Tungus from 2021, which braid together the May Fourth Movement of 1919, the Chinese civil war and folk memory. Tungus is set in Changchun in 1948 and follows two Korean soldiers in the Chinese army, folding in the memory of the Jeju April 3 incident in Korea. Across the exhibition, the artists use photography and film to test how land, history, self and other, past and present answer one another.