A BAGUIO-BORN Japanese photographer is set to hold a digital art exhibition at 5 p.m., Friday, September 8, at The Gallery, Lower Basement, SM City Baguio.
In this exhibition, Rudy Furuya will use his photographs in combination with computer graphics to make image representations of dreams that visit on him recurrently.
Furuya's works incorporate scenes and elements from his dreams to photographs he had taken during his visits to Baguio the past few years or to photographs of a young Rudy taken by his father.
His childhood in Baguio repeatedly appears as a beautiful element in his dreams. But his experiences when they were forced to escape and live in the Ifugao mountains during the war – the bombings, the fear, hunger, hopelessness, sickness, and the death of Baguio Japanese whom he knew –continue visit his dreams in some form or other.
Through these images, Furuya takes us along his journey into a visionary realm, a dimension of inner richness – where dreams, fantasy, and memory collide and merge.
Furuya was born in Baguio in November 1933 and was a student at the Baguio Japanese School at the outbreak of the Second World War in 1941.
His father was chief photographer of Pine Studio, the photography section of the Japanese Bazaar on Session Road. He grew up in Baguio in the 1930s and is personally familiar with that period in its history when the city flourished as a highland capital. For a young Rudy, it was sheer delight to have the entire city as his playground in those days. The Session Road - Burnham Park area was his neighborhood.
But World War II changed all that. After his family was repatriated to Japan at the end of the war in 1945, for Rudy, leaving Baguio was like being separated from a mother. To him, “Baguio is my hometown. I have no hometown in Japan.”
The recollections of the Baguio of his youth made quite an imprint on Rudy’s spirit and have become a meaningful part of his sensibility today as an artist-photographer.
In the 1990s, he began making trips to his hometown Baguio, to meet old schoolmates, revisit the places of his childhood, and find new directions for his art.
In 2002, Furuya began photographic explorations with Ompong Tan and Tommy Hafalla in Baguio. These resulted in his first solo show held at the UP Baguio’s Galerya Kordilyera in February 2005 and their trio show in October 2005. He held his second solo exhibition at The Gallery, SM City Baguio in 2009 and his third solo show at the Bencab Museum in 2013.
“Dreams” is Furuya’s fourth solo exhibition in Baguio. For info or inquiries, write to erlynruth2013@ gmail.com . The exhibition will run until October 30. (E.R. Alcantara)