On my second day in Kyoto for the KYOTOGRAPHIE Kyoto International Photography Festival, I detoured from the main exhibitions to check out Masahiro Usami (宇佐美雅浩)’s exhibition Manda-la in the KG+ Select show at the Horikawa Oike Gallery. By the time I’d left, I felt I had been led through a meditation on how to see.

The theme of KYOTOGRAPHIE this year was Source or Origins, and their elaboration on the theme is interesting:  “The source is the beginning, the initiator, the origin of all things. It is the creation of life, a place where conflict arises or freedom is obtained; it is the space in which something is found, born, or created. Regardless of our life’s juncture, we stand at a crossroads, oscillating between returning to the primal origin and beginning something new. It is from this sacred space that the symphony of life, love, and pain reverberates.” The artists of KG+ Select this year — and many of the artists in the main exhibitions — chose to focus on the journey that proceeds from conflict. 

A satellite program of KYOTOGRAPHIE, KG+ features nearly 100 exhibitions dedicated to emerging photographers, although some are pretty established. KG+ Select is an open-entry juried show within KG+ that featured ten artists vying for the KG＋ Awards 2024 Grand Prix and an invitation to exhibit in KYOTOGRAPHIE 2025. Liu Hsing-Yu won for “The Mail Address is No Longer Valid,” which also documents a journey that is as relational as temporal and was moving; in fact, all of these exhibitions were interesting, but I will cover only Masahiro’s work here.

Masahiro creates art — mandalas in the form of photographs, to be precise — by undertaking a journey, as much relational as through time and space, to understand and capture the essence of a community’s journey in collaboration with that community. In his words, “Each individual photograph [in his long-running mandala series] features a central figure, all of whom come from different regions and standpoints, and then distributed in their environs are the people and things that express the world of that particular figure, just like the form of a Buddhist mandala painting.” While he includes two projects in this exhibition from the mandala series that he began more than 20 years ago in art school, one created in Cypress in 2017 and another created in 2023 in Tokyo, I will focus here on walking you through my encounter with the latter.

Upon first glance at his photo, I see two groups of people facing one another. The exhibition is called Manda-la, but it doesn’t look anything like a mandala. I guess it’s supposed to be a mandala made of people instead of lines arranged into geometric patterns…. A mandala’s function is to provide something to focus on while meditating, so maybe the artist wants us to meditate on this group of people. Hmm… 

Many of the people in the front/center are squatting like American football players. I see that the title of this particular photo is 「 Silent Rugger Men, Jingu Gaien 2023 」. Does that refer to rugby? Is this photo meant to suggest a rugby scrum? But they are in the middle of a street, and the people on the right are all wearing hard hats and black suits, and the ones behind the front line hold sticks or something. Are they police batons? No, they seem to be short-handled shovels and chainsaws! In contrast, the group to the left is wearing a variety of casual and more colorful everyday wear, and the ones behind the front line take a variety of athletic poses. I see footballs, a tennis racket, a baseball bat, soccer balls…. Some appear to be holding out trays of food. How curious!

So the composition seems to suggest conflict or the threat of conflict between “armed” construction workers and businessmen on the one side and people who engage in a variety of recreational activities on the other side, not a very fair or likely fight! Hmm, what’s going on here? I always associated mandalas with peace, and this image is not peaceful at all. Maybe mandalas help bring about a peaceful mind by bringing whatever thoughts are in our minds, including the troubling ones, to our attention so that we can contemplate and better understand what is causing them and resolve them? Is the point of this photo to get us to consider the roots of whatever conflict is being evoked?

I recalled that making a mandala can itself be a meditative process. What went into the creation of this photo?  It’s obviously a staged photo. So everyone who appears in it has chosen to be there and is cooperating in creating the image, even though they appear at first to be divided. Who are they, and why are they arranged this way? What conflict are they depicting?

The title seems to refer to Meiji-jingū Gaien 明治神宮外苑, a beloved western-style park at the center of Tokyo that is something akin to NYC’s Central Park. It encompasses forested walkways, bodies of water, gardens, a children’s play area, lawns, and cultural and sports facilities, including Jingu Stadium, home of Tokyo’s professional baseball team, and Japan National Stadium, the flagship venue for the Tokyo 2020 Olympic & Paralympic Games. A proposed large-scale redevelopment of Meiji-jingū Gaien has sparked vigorous community pushback over the planned removal of many trees and the potential negative impact on the park’s beloved Four Rows of Ginkgo Trees, planted in 1926 when the park was created in celebration of the Meiji emperor and his wife and considered the fundamental feature of the garden. A petition calling to save the park’s trees and re-think the plan has collected well over 200,000 signatures. Even celebrities such as Haruki Murakami and Ryuichi Sakamoto publicly urged the government to rethink the project. Maybe the confrontation depicted in the photograph refers to this? That would explain the presence of those shovels and chainsaws, tools used to cut down or dig out trees and vegetation.

In fact, the exhibition description does state that the photo “depicts the confrontation between developers who want to move forward with the project and citizens demanding that further discussions be held before proceeding.” Did Masahiro actually manage to bring all of these people together to participate in creating this photo? Imagine calling up the city of Tokyo and a giant development company and asking them to send a bunch of their employees to the park to pose in this way with the very people who have been strongly criticizing them and seeking to delay their project!

These people could only have been brought together in this way if Masahiro had spent much time getting to know them, listening to their concerns, and understanding their points of view and visions for the park. Over the course of his many visits and conversations with the stakeholders, they must have come to trust that his purpose was not to judge any of them or take sides. I believe that he also convinced them that this project would not only do no harm but would depict them all positively, in a fair and dignified manner, and would accurately and artfully express the essence of a situation that was of great interest and importance to a significant number of people in a way that would be worth their time and effort.  

Furthermore, while the image does not depict any resolution to the conflict, it does depict both parties working together in a way that, to some extent, transcends their differences. That is an admirable accomplishment they have shared with the larger community. The photograph, therefore, represents the culmination of a journey undertaken by all participants, a journey toward understanding one another and the project itself. Further evidence of this journey is a preparatory sketch for the photograph that Masahiro exhibits here alongside the photo, the composition of which he developed in collaboration with the stakeholders. 

Given how many people appear in the photo, this was an enormous undertaking that required Masahiro not only to get everyone to agree to the idea of the photograph but also to get everyone needed to make time to show up for the shoot without financial compensation. The many props had to be acquired and brought to the location. Because the camera is looking down on the scene from the center, a temporary platform had to be constructed from which Masahiro could take the photo. Masahiro uses a large format camera requiring a tripod, so he could not have taken the shot from a ladder that was quickly placed and removed. Permission had to be arranged for the street to be closed off and the platform to be erected. Numerous volunteers were likely needed to help manage all of this so that on the day of the shoot, Masahiro could focus on directing and positioning his subjects and taking the actual photo.

Later, I wrote to Masahiro and asked whether the people in the photo representing the developers were actually from the development company. He replied that he had tried really hard to establish a dialog with various backers of the redevelopment, but no one would agree to join his project. He believed that only the redevelopment plan’s leaders were passionate about it and that many lower-level staffers had reservations but were afraid to get involved. Finally, he had to give up on bringing them into the process, but he felt strongly about the project and wanted to go through with it anyway. Cleverly, he recruited volunteers to dress up as park workers to represent them. Again, this must have been challenging to accomplish.

He also told me that he was refused permission to close the road temporarily to take the photo so he had to conduct the shoot very quickly in the early morning while no cars were approaching, meaning he had to get that large group of volunteers to agree to come to the park very early. Incredibly, they had only 65 seconds while the traffic lights were red to get everything set up, take the photo, and clear out of the street again! To accomplish this, he instructed the participants in advance about their roles and positioning and practiced getting set up with them in a nearby parking lot. There was no time to set up a platform in the street on which to position the camera stand, nor would it have been allowed to set one up, so he had to manage holding the large camera up in the air as best he could. 

My initial reading of the photograph and conclusions about the process were therefore quite off! Was I projecting, wanting this to represent the happiest of outcomes? Hmm… This is a valuable lesson and perhaps further evidence of the photograph’s success as a mandala. It has succeeded in calling my attention to how the mind can jump to conclusions and run with one interpretation based on underlying desires and beliefs. Artworks like this show us something about the world and, at the same time, reveal to us something about ourselves.

Masahiro shared a rough cut of a documentary he is creating about this process with me. One of the people he interviewed and worked with is a rugby player. One of the stadiums in the park, Chichibunomiya Rugby Stadium, is the mecca of rugby in Japan and was only constructed following a tremendous effort by the rugby community to raise funds for it after the war. Members of the rugby community are extremely upset with the redevelopment’s planned demolition of the historic stadium and construction of a new one in a new location, which they regard as being disrespectful of the sacrifices made to build that historic stadium and the love and appreciation that the community feels towards it. This explains the rugby scrum positioning of the people in the photograph.

Even though Masahiro failed to persuade the developers to participate in the project, the elements of the image still reflect the culmination of a long collaborative process and sincere attempts to bring everyone together to represent this controversial inflection point in the history of a beloved park at the center of Japan’s capital. As I learned more about Masahiro’s career and previous community mandala creation projects, I discovered how successful he has been in the past at bringing together people with differing backgrounds, attitudes, and points of view. I believe that the refusal of the park redevelopment representatives to participate in his latest one is their failure and not his. It makes them look bad and reinforces the widespread belief that the government and its development partners only pretended to care about public opinion while forcing this development on the community for financial reasons. Masahiro doesn’t explicitly criticize them or take sides, but the developers’ behavior speaks for itself.

It’s worth noting that after this photograph was created, the park developers did somewhat revise their plan to better protect the root systems of the historic ginko trees, slightly reduce the number of trees to be removed, and further increase the total number of trees and green space. However, many of the plan’s opponents think the changes do not go far enough and are still dissatisfied with the new plan and its development without sufficient community participation in the planning process. You can learn more about the tree-preserving revisions to the Jingu Gaien District Urban Redevelopment Project here:

From all of these elements, we can infer how much time, energy, and expense Masahiro had to put into this project to create this photograph, as well as the other photos in his Manda-La series. We can also recognize that Masahiro brings love, curiosity, patience, and emotional intelligence to his work. He must value getting to know and working with others as much or even more than he values creating the photos themselves. So, while at first, his photos may appear to be simply a creative aesthetic variation on the mandala, on deeper reflection, they convey so much more about himself, about people, about community, and about exploring and transcending disagreements. They don’t just position people in the shape of mandalas. They actually function as mandalas.

As a side note, I’d like to mention that this project made me reflect on a similar battle of park redevelopment close to my own home. Following the flooding caused by Hurricane Sandy in 2012, New York City began developing a plan to alter the East River Park, close to my home in Manhattan, to better contain future flooding caused by storms and rising sea levels. An extended community engagement process resulted in a plan to create a green hill over the FDR Highway, which runs the length of the park on its western side (the East River runs along the park’s eastern side). The plan would mostly preserve the existing park and extend its green space, creating more opportunities for flood waters as well as rainwater to be absorbed into the ground before reaching the many buildings and paved areas beyond. 

However, in the dead of night, the plan developed in close concert with the community was discarded, and the city adopted a new plan to bulldoze the park and all of its trees and raise it with landfill. The new plan would reduce the green space and the number and size of the trees while leaving the FDR Highway uncovered, and the construction contract was awarded to a company with minimal experience. The new plan is less equipped to deal with rainwater runoff and will only provide a barrier high enough to keep out flood waters for a few decades. It will funnel water at even higher pressure toward other nearby areas unprotected by such a wall, effectively shifting the threat to other areas of the city with weaker political representation. When the redevelopment is completed, the quality of the park for those who use it for a great variety of recreational activities will be reduced. And in the meantime, the park is being rendered mostly unusable for several years during the construction process.

Why? The city insists its new plan is better but will not explain why, or why it abandoned the process of developing the plan with the community to adopt this new one suddenly and without further community input. To observers, it seemed that at the last minute, the wishes of affluent donors who did not want their commute to work by private car on the FDR Highway disrupted had been prioritized over everything else. It’s difficult to know for certain. All correspondence about the abrupt change of plans has been withheld from the public, and communications about the selection of the developer have also been redacted. I could go on, but I think you can see the parallels to the Japanese park re-development controversy.

I bring this up to illustrate that art can help us understand a specific situation in such a way as to inspire us to consider many other situations in a new light as well. Masahiro did not need to refer to the East River Park redevelopment plan to get me thinking about it and how the needs, desires, and wisdom of communities often conflict with those in power worldwide. In his documentary about the project, Masahiro notes that he was inspired by the work of the noted academic Kohei Saito, associate professor at the Graduate School of Culture at the University of Tokyo, who told him that If 3.5% of the public actively speak out in concert about an issue, it can be enough to change society. It’s a much smaller number than one might think. Not everyone has room to go to protests, but not everyone has to do so to spark change. 

A small number of vocal and imaginative activists were able to bring sufficient attention to the Meiji-jingū Gaien redevelopment plan’s shortcomings to attract widespread media coverage and more than 200,000 signatures in opposition, putting political pressure on the plan’s backers. The number of people who signed the petition is significant but falls short of 3.5% of the population of Tokyo. Maybe that is why they managed to force the developers to modify the plan but only modestly. Nevertheless, we can see that art and other forms of creative activism have an outsized ability to impact our thinking in ways that we cannot predict. We should never underestimate the power of love creatively channeled to change the world.

If you’d like to learn more about Masahiro’s work, you can watch the fascinating video below documenting the mandala photograph he created with the residents of Hiroshima in the lead-up to the 70th anniversary of the bombing. That photograph remarkably features many of the surviving hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors) alongside many babies. This documentary captures their sometimes uncomfortable journey to arrive at a consensus about how to depict such a sensitive and painful experience in a way that might resonate with future generations. Honestly, Masahiro’s work provides so many examples of the power of love and art to bring people together that one could write a book about it, so I hope you will feel inspired to explore further!

Masahiro’s web site is usamimasahiro.com.  Follow him on Instagram at @usamimasahiro.