MYSTERY CIRCUS

Lilly Wei

Aram Tanis, who studied in Seoul and Amsterdam, is a photographer who searches for more truthful and provocative images than those usually composed for mass media. The cities of Asia - Macau, Seoul, Kyoto, Osaka and Tokyo - have been his usual locations, but for this work he also started to work in Dusseldorf, where there is also a large Korean and Japanese community.

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For Mystery Circus Aram Tanis brings together his photographs from these different cities to comment on the anonymity of contemporary urban life and juxtaposes that body of work with another that is focused on the specific, aberrant details of urbanization and industrialization, discovering another kind of beauty. Marlene Dumas says it well: "Aram Tanis is open towards the undiscriminating beauty residing in all things, also those things seen as obscene, that make us the tragic, cultural beings that we are."