The central theme of the series "japanese style" is the transition of real urban living spaces into media-driven artificial worlds of perception, so-called "virtual environments".

Taking Japan as a case study, the project translates this development into visual terms which carry a broad applicability for the future transformation of all other urban social spaces. "japanese style" is a portrait of the generation which strives to be different no matter how high the price. Yet it also embraces synthetic image-worlds where the cachet of the exotic mingles with virtual abstraction and the artificiality of Japanese society to form one key amalgam.

Japanese society is a virtual, artificial conglomerate of multiple levels of reality packed one into the other like so many little boxes, defying rational investigation, visceral energising and the new shape of the future.

The core feature of what we call "japanese style" is to be found in the unrelenting drive for change which springs from the absence of a central integrating principle and which seeks its constitutive elements not in the substance of things themselves but rather in their inter-relationships. This form of understanding, coupled with the vertiginous pace of transformation to virtual environments, gives us a presentiment or premonition of what our cities and our lives in the 21st century will look like.

The series consists of eight portaits of Japanese teenagers and ten works showing persons acting in a virtual urban environment.