The City & The City Thom Bridge & Taisuke Koyama

The City & The City is a photographic exchange between artists Thom Bridge (SE/UK) and Taisuke Koyama (JP), based in the UK and Tokyo respectively. Their collaboration explores the visual textures of their three home cities, focusing on urban surfaces shaped by reconstruction, demolition, and renewal. Using fast, lo-fi printing, inverted city images are transferred onto colour paper, revealing the city as an irreversible, imagined space shaped by desire and planning.

Rather than specific locations, the work highlights recurring scenes—construction sites, neglected areas, and in-between spaces—common to modern urban life. The title references China Miéville’s 2009 novel, where overlapping cities coexist unseen by their inhabitants, with a mythical third city said to lie in the space between.

This project is part of Chapter Five, a curatorial program connecting artists and organisations through experimental exhibition models and collaborative dialogue, both online and offline.

Publisher Surface Editions
Softcover with Acetate
68 pages
205 x 290 mm