Tokyo based Koichi Nishiyama was born in 1968 in Yokohama, Japan. He studied contemporary art at B Seminar School in Yokohama. After graduation, he undertook performance art, Installation art, and organized exhibitions. He took up photography in 2007 by studying “Workshop Calotype” by Jun Shiraoka in Tokyo. I started to take pictures at a certain moment because I had a camera. But I had little awareness of what is an “art work”. Even so, I kept doing it. I had a feeling that if I collect photographs and give them a title it will become an “art work” and if I show it to someone, something important may come out. While continuing my shooting experience I started designing spaces, then by gathering people I created opportunities for exhibitions. As a result of my exploration of the context of space, my expression has taken different forms. Perhaps I am shifting the boundaries between "personal experience," "work," "artist," and "photographer" to question each notion. Since my childhood I did not know what to do with the feeling of ambiguity about the outside world. The camera helped me to express myself in a desperate attempt to close the gap between the external reality and the self, to think once again about the “exhibition” that is held in a limited time in a limited space and my own rampantly multiplying thoughts and the system of reality. Photos that look exactly like reality, and yet are always different from it, amaze me. I keep making something new out of that similarity because it seems to reconcile my feeling of strangeness with the world.