Square Street Gallery proposes a solo presentation of the Japanese artist Daisuke Tajima. Tajima’s work examines the elan of megacities today, which is underwritten with ambition, acceleration, and complete apathy. For Asia NOW, the artist will present two distinct bodies of work: the “day” series and the “night” series, the former rendered in black ink against a white background and the latter deploying white ink against a black background. Seemingly sterile from afar — with its structured and larger-than-life presence — Tajima’s drawings reveal their humanity on closer examination, as pools of ink break the deceptively straight lines. Between these lines, Tajima opens the viewer onto a fantastical space, revealing the disparity between the aspiration of modernity and its lived experience; as each aspect of our lives is packaged, commodified, and sold, we find ourselves increasingly alienated from ourselves and the world we inhabit.

The promise and identity of a city lies in the collective memories of those who inhabit it, past, present, and future. Working from the memories of his visits to Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Mainland China, as opposed to photographic references, the Nara-born artist composes fantastical cityscapes decked with imposing high-rises, signages, and machinery. Rendered with a cartographer’s pen onto handcrafted panels, Tajima’s cities are at once sites of abundant expansion and chaotic destruction, often respectively visualized through the cranes and armoured tanks that roam them. In the hands of the artist, the landscape no longer becomes a window, they solidify the hope for expansion and the isolation written into the alienating script of development. They are pharmakon — both poison and cure.