Open the door to the childhood home of Tokyo-based photographer Motoyuki Daifu and prepare to be welcomed by heaps of toys, clothes, and hastily prepared meals. Scenes from his home will show at Los Angeles' Little Big Man Gallery Saturday night in a exhibit delicately titled My Family is a Pubis, so I Cover it in Pretty Panties. The ongoing series of family portraits lands somewhere between the imagery of Grey Gardens and Lost In Translation, depicting the evolving chaos of his very atypical environment.
In his artist statement for the 2014 Prix Pictet Consumption, for which the project was shortlisted, Daifu summarized the world he captures: “My mother sleeps every day. My dad does chores. My brothers fight. There are trash bags all over the place. Half-eaten dinners, cat poop, mountains of clothes: this is my lovable daily life, and a loveable Japan.”
Motoyuki Daifu is no stranger to Opening Ceremony—in addition to his editorial shoot in OC Annual, “Flyweight,” which features roughhousing models decked out in Toga and Adidas, he also shot the lookbook for the exclusive Kiko Mizuhara collection last year. The 28-year-old Japanese photographer specializes in glossy, analogue snaps of everyday tumult.
With the help of translator and good sport Jeffrey Ian Rosen of Misako & Rosen Gallery in Tokyo, we were able to ask Daifu some questions about these intimate yet carefully composed images and the experience of growing up among the clutter. Though most of the images have been on view in a variety of settings over the past six years, Daifu is still drawn to the texture and color in specific images of the family’s kitchen table, where his mother often holds court. “She doesn’t know how to make food, but she makes a lot of it. Nobody eats it.” In one image, spaghetti is paired with crab legs. In another, fresh vegetables are sliced next to a package of fermented soy beans.
Daifu’s family moved into their two-story Yokohama home, where the photographer still lives with his parents and two brothers, ten years ago. His two sisters have since moved away to school, but over the years the clan of seven have all found ways to cram their lives under this one roof. At the time they moved in, the family was thrilled with the space, as previously they had been cooped up in a “mansion,” as the Japanese refer to apartments. The family simply “couldn’t fit in that space anymore, and everyone was growing up,” Daifu explained. “It was a much smaller living situation that was really dirty and messy,” he recalled of their earlier home.
On the surface, the same characteristics could be ascribed to their current home, but in the clutter live details and a certain quality of life—the space is clearly lived in and shared to the fullest. “It’s chill there—you can’t really relax in a really clean house. Here everything is a mess.”
Although the images have been shot over a period of ten years, the show at Little Big Man Gallery includes work shots as recently as a month ago, and features a newfound object piece straight from his mother’s closet. A totem of vintage clothing, recent additions to his mother’s collection of secondhand blouses and dresses, suspends from the ceiling of the space. Daifu’s mother is “reall
In his artist statement for the 2014 Prix Pictet Consumption, for which the project was shortlisted, Daifu summarized the world he captures: “My mother sleeps every day. My dad does chores. My brothers fight. There are trash bags all over the place. Half-eaten dinners, cat poop, mountains of clothes: this is my lovable daily life, and a loveable Japan.”
Motoyuki Daifu is no stranger to Opening Ceremony—in addition to his editorial shoot in OC Annual, “Flyweight,” which features roughhousing models decked out in Toga and Adidas, he also shot the lookbook for the exclusive Kiko Mizuhara collection last year. The 28-year-old Japanese photographer specializes in glossy, analogue snaps of everyday tumult.
With the help of translator and good sport Jeffrey Ian Rosen of Misako & Rosen Gallery in Tokyo, we were able to ask Daifu some questions about these intimate yet carefully composed images and the experience of growing up among the clutter. Though most of the images have been on view in a variety of settings over the past six years, Daifu is still drawn to the texture and color in specific images of the family’s kitchen table, where his mother often holds court. “She doesn’t know how to make food, but she makes a lot of it. Nobody eats it.” In one image, spaghetti is paired with crab legs. In another, fresh vegetables are sliced next to a package of fermented soy beans.
Daifu’s family moved into their two-story Yokohama home, where the photographer still lives with his parents and two brothers, ten years ago. His two sisters have since moved away to school, but over the years the clan of seven have all found ways to cram their lives under this one roof. At the time they moved in, the family was thrilled with the space, as previously they had been cooped up in a “mansion,” as the Japanese refer to apartments. The family simply “couldn’t fit in that space anymore, and everyone was growing up,” Daifu explained. “It was a much smaller living situation that was really dirty and messy,” he recalled of their earlier home.
On the surface, the same characteristics could be ascribed to their current home, but in the clutter live details and a certain quality of life—the space is clearly lived in and shared to the fullest. “It’s chill there—you can’t really relax in a really clean house. Here everything is a mess.”
Although the images have been shot over a period of ten years, the show at Little Big Man Gallery includes work shots as recently as a month ago, and features a newfound object piece straight from his mother’s closet. A totem of vintage clothing, recent additions to his mother’s collection of secondhand blouses and dresses, suspends from the ceiling of the space. Daifu’s mother is “reall