Shibuya is flooded with all sorts of people - people of all ages, people from all walks of life. Perhaps, that is what underscores the rapid pace at which it continuously changes in the name of urban redevelopment. I am personally drawn to Shibuya and began photographing its idiosyncrasies in 2018 with the goal of making these photos my signature work.

I pressed the shutter button the instant something struck my heart, whether it was a telling moment or an uneventful scene. In effect, by taking pictures with my camera of the world before my eyes, which we see but we donʼt see, and the typically mundane routines that we all eventually forget about, I am freezing and capturing a moment in time. So, I wonder if these photos happened by pure chance or whether I was destined to take them. Curiously enough, the act of pressing the shutter button may very well convert something totally accidental into the inevitable.

Thereʼs more. At the same time I am going face-to-face with the neighborhood of Shibuya through the lens, I am also looking squarely at myself because little by little it is starting to become clear what I wanted to capture and show the world in the mountains of photographs I have taken till now. As the exhibition title suggests, not just the people and stories you run into in Shibuya but also the chance of self-examining oneself, which is what I have done with through these photographs, comes once in a lifetime.