Tokyo based Pen Magazine writes about Yoko Ikeda, Toshio Shibata and Lena C. Emery

Three photographers, Yoko Ikeda, Toshio Shibata and Lena C. Emery, are all celebrating the majestic nature of Japanese trees in their own way, with a book and a double exhibition. With Treescapes, a joint exhibition commissioned by the New York-based Laurence Miller Gallery, Yoko Ikeda and Toshio Shibata contrast their different but complementary views of nature….The magical dimension to her work echoes that of Lena C. Emery, a young German photographer. Her love of trees dates back to her childhood, when she walked around the different nature reserves in Singapore. Her new book, Yuka & the Forest, tells the contemplative story of Yuka, the solitary fictional character, in the mysterious, dense and poetic spaces in the Japanese forest. The photographer also pays homage to the Shintoist concept of chinju-no-mori (broadly speaking, the notion of the idolisation and protection of nature), which she discovered on one of her many trips to Japan over the past few years. The whole work is printed on recycled paper and thus actively strives to preserve the forest: 10% of the profits go straight to the WWF to help protect the environment.