The exhibition "Stream of Consciousness" at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery is an extremely successful representation of contemporary Japanese photographic art. It combines some of the salient aspects of Japanese culture with the aesthetically formal, yet emotive imagery that is indicative of what gives photography in Japan its particular flavor.

The images are courtly, precise and elegant. A few hours after seeing the exhibition, while talking to a Tokyo University of Arts Ph.D candidate, I was wondering what kind of person the artist could be, when an charmingly schlubby guy in sweat shirt and pants with a worn-out Chiquita-banana-branded shopping bag over his shoulder quietly shuffled into the modest venue we were in and apologized to the student for not answering his emails.

Behold Risaku Suzuki. How fortunate for this reviewer — except that artist Suzuki is not, by his own admission, fond of talking. It was not until I mentioned the beautiful unfocused circles of light in one of his video pieces of a pond — a work that lays flat on the ground like a virtual water feature in the exhibition — that he began to open up. Only supremely good optics will render out-of-focus highlights as perfectly round (cheaper camera lenses have fewer aperture iris blades resulting in polygonal shapes) and Suzuki was delighted that someone noticed this.