"When I start playing with a memory I take the whole place as a theatre. It becomes a theatrical space,
where I act out and direct in my own memory"

At the age of 10 Chino Otsuka moved from Japan to England to attend Summerhill, a self-governing boarding school founded by A.S. Neill.
These photographs from the series Summer deal with one aspect of her experiences as a Japanese person living in England. They show the artist revisiting both the site, and her memories of her time at the school.
In much of her work Otsuka chooses the self portrait as a way of exploring her cultural identity - a double identity of Japanese origin and continued influence, yet one also firmly rooted in western culture. She addresses the task of maintaining a relationship between these two backgrounds both through her work and her daily life.
Her photographs are carefully constructed to place an emphasis on the relationship of the figure to a specific space. She does this by employing techniques used in cinema and film making such as specific lighting, staging and narrative to allow viewers to develop an emotional response to her work.
Although Summer is based on a very personal recollection the series plays on universal experiences of school and the endless English summers of childhood to evoke the viewers own associative memories.

- from Victoria & Albert Museum press release.