Leafy Yun Ye’s fascination with the dreamy, uncanny beauty of Tokyo

Born and raised in Guangzhou, China, but now based in Los Angeles, photographer Leafy Yun Ye is repeatedly drawn to explore ideas of migration, cultural belonging, community and landscape and how these things are felt and understood through the prism of personal experience. It’s this constellation of obsessions which undoubtedly led her to Tokyo – a city which, for Leafy, never quite gives up its secrets. From her outsider’s perspective, Tokyo remains always “strange and mysterious”, never quite consummating her desire to understand it (in such a way as place can ever be understood or feel legible). 

“The allure of Tokyo for me is the never-ending mysteriousness,” she says. “Just when I think I have figured out what’s going on, nope, I still don’t get it.” Leafy’s first visited the city in 2016, to shoot scenes for a film about Japanese hostess girls in New York City. “I was too young and clueless to comprehend the complexity of Tokyo at that time,” she recalls, “but I remember how attractive the nighttime underground culture was… There was always something unexpected happening.” 

Tokyo Odyssey is the narrative documentary photo series which has emerged from her ongoing fascination with this “unique universe”. In a conversation over email, the photographer tells Dazed: “[The city is] a harmonious collision of Eastern and Western, traditional and subcultural, order and chaos, polite yet hysterical… when a place can be so multifaceted, it becomes surreal.” With an eye for delicious compositions of colour, light and form, Leafy captures moments and scenes which embody this sense of “collision”, from kawai onesies and shiba inus posing in heart bathtubs to the halo of golden morning light over the dense city, a passerby in an incongruous monster mask, and Mt. Kumotori rising serene and blue in the distance.

While so much about the city inevitably continues to remain unknowable, what did her time in Tokyo reveal to her, particularly about the city’s youth culture? “It’s really diverse,” she observes, “from vintage to anime style, Lolita to Tokko Fuku, traditional kimono to gothic, and Decora Kei, etcetera. Essentially, it’s about the spirit of expressing themselves freely. One of the photos captured a girl in a pink jumper in Shinjuku. She was singing really loudly without music on a street corner. I thought she was really brave so I asked her to let me take a photo. Another photo was of a group of kids staying out late in Kabukicho. Later, my Japanese friend told me they were Toyoko kids – the lonely street children of Tokyo – a marginalised youth community running away from home. I documented it simply because of their unique subcultural style, but learning about the background gave me different views on these photographs.” 

A huge component of Tokyo’s appeal is, for Leafy, the collision between her expectations of Tokyo and its actuality. It’s a landscape that looms vividly in the cultural imagination. The photographer’s own ideas of Japan and its culture were influenced early on by watching Hayao Miyazaki’s movies and animation like Naruto. More recently, she loved Atarashii Gakko and their music videos (Super creative and stylish!). But her favourite sources of Tokyo inspiration are television shows like Tokyo Vice and Shogun – narrative stories about Japan through the Western lens - an outsider’s view – which sit somewhere in a place where reality and fantasy co-exist in the same shared space. “This is what I like the most, a collision of different worlds and cultures. No matter how close I get to it, I will always be an outsider observing Tokyo, which gives me more freedom to find that blurry line in this project.”

As an admirer of Feng Li, Leafy’s images also betray a shared instinct for the funny incongruities of everyday life. “I was looking for classic and bizarre scenes with a sense of humour,” she tells us. But, ultimately, the abiding source of her love of Tokyo is its dreamy, uncanny beauty. “Gradually though, I fell back into finding the poetry and beauty of Tokyo – I just can’t resist the beautiful stuff! There were these quiet moments that were so elegant, I felt like I stumbled into someone else’s dreams.”

Follow Leafy Yun Ye on Instagram to keep updated on the progress of Tokyo Odyssey and other projects.