Hayahisa Tomiyasu
Same procedure as every day
It all started with a fox. Hayahisa Tomiyasu came across it one evening as he was strolling in Leipzig, where he was studying photography. Enthralled by the sight of the wild animal he would certainly never have encountered in his home town of Tokyo, he quickly pressed the shutter button on his camera and hoped to see it again. And he did. Soon after, he spotted it a second time while looking out of his bedroom window. He decided to keep his eye – and his lens – trained on the field outside his student dorm and literally lie in wait for the fox. After days without success, he realised that his attention was increasingly being drawn to something completely different – the bustling activity of local people at a ping-pong table set slightly apart at the edge of the grass. They played, worked out, drank or sometimes just sat, deep in thought. Fascinated by their comings and goings, he continued to observe them. Almost obsessively, he spent several hours a day photographing everything that happened around the table. Days turned into weeks, weeks into months, and months into years. Tomiyasu only ended this series of photos, which he called TTP (short for “Tischtennisplatte”, the German word for a ping-pong table), when he moved out of the dormitory. The frame of each shot and the perspective remain the same throughout. As a result, the focus is always on the subjects of his photographs: children and adults, people alone, in couples or groups, doing mundane things like picnicking, playing football, yoga or martial arts.
In Tomiyasu’s series, the ping-pong table becomes a stage for social interaction. But why is it such a popular meeting place? Built as a piece of sports equipment, it is not a particularly inviting place to hang out. Neither is it in an attractive location, set on a small, dreary patch of green squeezed in between a carpark and tower blocks. But the lack of alternatives makes the locals resourceful. To meet up, they appropriate places – in this case a ping-pong table – in their own way. Whether as a table, bench, workout equipment or hiding place, their creativity knows no limits. Strangely enough, the only thing the table was not used for one single time was to play table tennis.
Tomiyasu never saw the fox again.
An audioguide is available for this artist below as well as a video in our media library.
Biographical information
1982
born in Chigasaki, Kanagawa, Japan
2002 to 2006
Bachelor in Photography, Tokyo Polytechnic University
2008 to 2013
Diploma in photography at the “Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst” Leipzig
2013 to 2016
Master class at the “Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst” Leipzig with Prof. Peter Piller
lives in Zurich, Switzerland and Chigasaki, Japan