How a relocation to one of the world’s most typographically dense cities changed an artist’s practice permanently
Walk out of almost any Tokyo subway exit and you are immediately in the presence of four writing systems simultaneously. Kanji, hiragana, katakana, and rōmaji compete across every surface — shop signs, vending machines, advertisements, street markings — each carrying different semantic weight, different historical associations, and different aesthetic character. The city is, among other things, a daily lesson in what happens when multiple script systems coexist in the same visual field.
For Ben Sheppee, arriving in Tokyo in the mid-2000s, this was not background noise. It was the material he had been looking for.
Sheppee had been making typographic work for years by the time he arrived — building a practice around the aesthetics of written language, the way letterforms carry cultural meaning that persists even when the semantic content is removed or distorted. He had co-founded Lightrhythm Visuals in San Francisco in 2003, a label that published short-form audiovisual art internationally and gave him a working understanding of how visual culture circulated across national borders. He had been exhibiting in London, performing at festivals, building the infrastructure of an international practice.
But Tokyo changed something.
Density and coexistence
Visualux and the community of practice
Between 2007 and 2009, Sheppee organised Visualux, a series of events at SuperDeluxe in Roppongi. SuperDeluxe occupied a particular position in Tokyo’s experimental culture — a basement space beneath an unremarkable building in an unremarkable part of the city that had, over time, become a meeting point for electronic musicians, visual artists, performers, and the overlapping communities between them. It was exactly the kind of venue that Sheppee had been working in and around since his London days: a place defined less by its architecture than by the quality of attention its audience brought.
Photo Credit : Don Kratzer
The ElectronicPub × Lightrhythm Sessions at Seco Lounge in Shibuya had a more intimate register — smaller, more conversational, focused on the exchange between Japanese artists and international visitors. Together, the two series reflected Sheppee’s belief, developed over years of running Lightrhythm, that the audiovisual art scene functioned best as a community of practice rather than a hierarchy of individual reputations.
Photo Credit : Kevin Szegi
Meeting Shantell Martin
What Tokyo left in the work
There is also something of Tokyo in the collaborative instinct — the conviction that art develops faster in community than in isolation, that the exchange between artists working in different traditions produces something neither could reach alone. Visualux was not a commercially driven enterprise. It was, by the accounts of those who attended, a genuinely open space. That openness, and the kind of work it produced, left a lasting mark.
