I Am Legend...Visions of a Post-Apocaluptic Tokyo

Motoda Hisaharu’s Neo-Ruin series of lithographs depicts a post-apocalyptic Tokyo, where familiar landscapes in the central districts of Ginza, Shibuya, and Asakusa are reduced to ruins and the streets eerily devoid of humans. The weeds that have sprouted from the fissures in the ground seem to be the only living organisms. “In ‘Neo-Ruins’, I wanted to capture both a sense of the world’s past and of the world’s future,” he explains.











































































Motoda’s view of the future at first seems nihilistic, but the proliferation of plant life in the ruined streets seems to suggest that there are other ways for the plant to survive even after our great cities have fallen.