The unmade bed in Sly Morikawa’s Tokyo hotel room looks sad and lonely against the grey walls and curtains in the images which open and close her new zine, 24/7 Paradise. “I spent a lot of time hiding in that room,” the artist says. “It was so small and plain that it almost magnified what I was feeling at any given time. Sometimes it was peaceful, other times it was claustrophobic. I took those photos before I left as a way to acknowledge the time spent there.”
It might seem paradoxical for a collection of photographs titled 24/7 Paradise to start (and end) like this, but it gets to the root of Sly’s entire project. Her grandparents passed away during the pandemic, and last summer was the first time she could return home to pay her respects. “The trip was incredibly overwhelming,” she says. “I was oscillating between the highs and lows of grief and joy, losing myself in nostalgia, reconnecting with my maternal roots, trying to pull back all the hidden layers of Japan.”
To process, Sly did what she always does and started taking pictures. From Fukuyama, where her family is from, to the unrelenting streets of Tokyo, she began documenting moments in time. But it was only on her return to Sydney, where she’s based, and through working with Oliver Shaw at Friend Editions on her zine that helped put intention back into the things she saw. “To process my story,” she says, and “to explore all the emotions that were already there.”
The project forced Sly to reflect on the deaths of her grandparents, but also on life itself — what she wanted, or what paradise might be. “Paradise to me is just everything I’ve ever wanted,” she says. “To be able to experience everything, to be present through the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly. To laugh, to cry, to lose yourself and find yourself again, to hide away from the world, and to throw myself back in.”
As a result, there’s an urgency to the images she’s collated. Pictures of colourful arcades where you can almost hear the noise of the machines, graffitied streets and drunken antics. There’s a glorification of indulgence, too; decadent scoops of ice cream, bright lights, fast cars, strip clubs. But there are also quieter and darker moments; a new grave beside a faded Coca-Cola sign, a tattooed leg slashed with bite marks or a woman’s scar just above her perfect white socks.
Peppered throughout the zine as well are tender portraits of friends and acquaintances. As the second youngest of six children, Sly has always felt like an observer: growing up in the backseat (“both figuratively and literally,” she says). Her images take on a voyeuristic quality, as she photographs women exploring the ancient Japanese knot-tying technique of shibari, pole dancers, a friend wearing lace white tights over a thong, her hair draped down her back. That friend crops up throughout the book in a series of soft, but seductive images that take on both an intimate and almost sleazy feel against Sly’s bland hotel room. “I’m also very sentimental,” she says. “I think both things contribute to having a voyeuristic lens.”
“Life is so fleeting,” she adds. “I want to hold onto it, remember it and I want to document people as they truly are.” Sly is nostalgic too. When she returned to Tokyo in November, she took her partner to a tonkatsu restaurant in Aoyama that her parents used to go to when they were dating in Tokyo in the 80s. “I love imagining what my parents lives were like,” she says. “My dad drove a bright red Supra Celica and has stories about getting pulled over by the police, driving way over the speed limit on the highways. My mum captured a lot of beautiful images of their life together in that era; she’s always had a predisposition towards artistic sensitivity.”
In many ways, 24/7 Paradise is a tribute to both of the artist’s parents. But it’s also a mix of sex, speed and violence, combined with moments of stillness and solitude. Just like the human experience there’s “light and dark, love and fear, harmony and dissonance,” Sly says. “We can’t have one without the other, we would never appreciate one without the other. I’ve always felt drawn to darker themes, but I’m not hardened by them and they don’t define my work. I think the quiet and the soft is where I reside most comfortably. But it’s all paradise, paradise is everything.”
24/7 Paradise by Sly Morikawa is available via Friend Editions.
Credits
Photography Sly Morikawa