Curator: Rodion Trofimchenko Is Photo camera a toy? Is Photograph a trifle made by a simple push of a button on a mobile phone to catch a moment of banal reality? Present-day Photo-Shot is heading towards its most shallow and irresponsible manifestations, turning into being just a Snap(-shot). Eventually, the appreciation of Photographic Image itself becomes a "Snap-Perception": a momentary glance, which just perceives a "real" object in something that originally was supposed to be a "drawing with light", a "photo(light)" - "graphy(drawing)". While photo camera becomes a commodity, mystery of photography is on the edge of turning into daily game, photographic image - into the "visual leftovers of existent objects", namely into the garbage. Tokyo Gallery + BTAP presents "The Photo-Graph of Nonexistent". Six artists from Japan, China and Korea exhibit works that draw attention to the imaginary side of the photography, to the virtual dimension of the media which is thought to produce just a copy of existing reality. Our critical aims are, first, to present the photograph as an act of deliberate intellectual and emotional work in which the button of photo camera is pressed with philosophical attitude. We present photographers that work out the imaginary of photo, rather than catch a peculiar moment or bizarre object. Second, we would like not just insist on the "painterly" dimensions of photography, but push this claim to its radical edge, namely, to present photography that aims at picturing something that is nonexistent both in the daily reality as well as in human imagination. In other words, this exhibition attempts to present the photography of unimaginable. Third, "The Photo-Graph of Nonexistent" is the exhibition of works that through resistance to plain duplication of the objects bring attention to the photography as media itself in its historical or anthropological aspects. The challenge of "The Photo-Graph of Nonexistent" is, while resisting the photography as daily life or garbage, to present works, which find the photo-imaginary in the daily life or garbage itself. In search of unreal we are heading not in a Church or UFO evidence site. In reverse, for the photograph of nonexistent we go into something that always presents itself as being very real or even banal, namely we are taking photo camera into the forest (Aramasa Taku), pay attention to daily landscapes (Furuya Man), approach body (Riichi Yamaguchi), observe city walls (Shigeki Yoshida), study old buildings (Koh Myung Keun) or photograph piles of old things and garbage itself (Song Dong). This is the way "The Photo-Graph of Nonexistent" overcomes "the photograph as daily life and garbage" with the help of "photograph of daily life and garbage". * The text was provided by Tokyo Gallery + BTAP.