Jan Vranovský: Parallel World - Invitation to the Opening

Although Japan is a country famous for its outstanding and often radical modern architecture, the overwhelming majority of the Japanese urban landscape is filled with houses devoid of any artistic or conceptual aspirations. These buildings are stripped of the ballast of an architect's ambitions, who, in most cases, has no involvement in their design. Likewise, a large part of the urban space grows and develops more as a chain reaction than as an implementation of a pre-prepared plan. This pragmatic, yet highly vibrant and constantly metabolizing space is also very dense in its local centers, and the individual forces, rules, and processes increasingly overlap, often leading to unexpected, bizarre situations and allowing for the emergence of unforeseen, unplanned phenomena. Consequently, Japanese traditions and cultural specifics permeate this space, which are still often unconscious and natural, alongside technical specifics largely imposed by the threat of devastating earthquakes, tsunami waves, fires, and landslides. The result is houses, streets, and cities that are completely different from those known in the West: seemingly disordered at first glance, yet fascinating, vibrant, bizarre, complex, and deeply Japanese upon closer inspection.
The Parallel World cycle is an attempt to capture the "ordinary" yet complicated spaces of Japanese cities, not in their entirety, but through their fragments: individualities, details, unexpected and unplanned relationships. The viewer can then assemble a holistic image of some archetypal Japanese city from these fragments, which in reality cannot be understood through the structure of streets or landmarks, but rather as a set of fragmented, randomly scattered, and ephemeral moments that shape it.
Architect, photographer, and designer Jan Vranovský (*1986) obtained a master's degree in architecture at the University of Tokyo in Japan. After graduation, he worked at several Tokyo architectural studios and later founded his own multidisciplinary practice, Studio VVAA. His photographs have been exhibited and published many times abroad, with two recently becoming part of the permanent collections of the Japanese Museum of Photography in Kiyosato, Yamanashi. He currently lives and works in Prague.