Dokuyama Bontaro

Dokuyama Bontaro

Born in 1984 in Fukushima. Currently lives in Tokyo. On March 11, 2011, he witnessed the utterly change of his hometown, and he faced deep despair, which became a motivation for him to confront arbitrariness and contradictions that he had overlooked. At the same time, he began to rethink his own life as a salaried employee, who had been working as a corporate slave, and also began to observe the flock of workers, who are made unconscious of their dependency on the current social mechanism. These observations have driven him to create his own artwork. Through creating art works, he has been trying to directly face the inescapable situation and the mental state of people, who "want to escape but cannot escape" in the localities, where media-covered incidents and phenomena happened in the past, and trying to understand the cause and the mechanism of social conformity. By re-researching the forgotten places and memories left-behind by the society, he has been attempting to reveal the reality, and to thresh out new formula to create changes in these places and events. While being chased by everyday life, issues are no longer considered as issues, and they are simply ignored. He wishes to face these issues that have been assimilated and become invisible in the landscape of everyday life, by approaching them from different angles. This is induced by his desire to see the reality that should be present when the society starts to operate.