Visual Haiku is an exploration of a poetic form in photographs. After exploring my Japanese heritage through the documentary street portfolio Tokyo -- Inside&Out, I wanted to move on, to make work less about compositional context and facts and more about ambiguity which shifts according to a specific context. After concentrating on the drama of the street in Tokyo for four years, capturing vendors, sararimen, prostitutes and school children on their daily paths in the urban landscape, I wanted to move beyond a photo essay and find a new way of expression which was lyrical and linked more by epiphany than logic. The subtle movement of a haiku poem seemed to me an interesting motif for translating into images. Besides playing on the pictographic shorthand of images of everyday objects, I have captured textures and different qualities of light which I believe add different layers of connotative meaning. Born Japanese and Jewish in Washington, D.C. in 1963, I felt fairly confused about my identity. Since my racial mix is fairly rare, I was more often labeled Chinese or American Indian or Indian from India or Italian; I didn't have accountability to an ethnic group when I met people. The integrating force of suburban America was very strong when I was growing up, and as a child I sought out hobbies and sports which would ally me with WASP culture: football, tennis, Cub Scouts. When I was older and visited and lived in Tokyo, I discovered that I could never become Japanese, and when people discovered that my blood was half Japanese, they were surprised and I was reclassified from gaijin, foreigner/outsider, to hafu, half. By the time I was an adult, it had become obvious to me that the assertion of my ethnicity would have to be studied and practiced, since physically I wore camouflage which seemed to deny me de facto membership into any race. This camouflaging by labels has been one of my major themes: how something on the surface can appear to be one thing, and upon further investigation, through close-up or new context, can be something entirely different. The U.S. and Japan are inextricably linked through trade and a bloody war, though aesthetically and culturally they are as different as any two nations can be. Much of my work is an attempt to bridge the differences, borrow forms and use them in new contexts, appropriate images and retransplant them. The three Visual Haiku selected for UNCOMMON TRAITS explore themes of camouflage, slavery, and liberation -- themes which both nations share, especially because of World War II. American slavery, the internment camps both here and in Southeast Asia, Shakespeare's Macbeth, the postwar Occupation, shame, the Oshima film Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, and isolation are some of the ideas I've drawn upon to build these visual poems. Each sculpture is seven feet high, a bit higher than a tall human. You can read them top to bottom, bottom to top, or as many Japanese read text, as a single snapshot of symbols which together give the entire meaning.   -Paul Takeuch   Paul Takeuchi is a photographer and writer living in NYC. His work has been published in a wide variety of print media, including The New York Times, Photo Metro, Tokyo Journal, and Kyoto Journal. In 1993, he was awarded an artist residency in Ucross, WY; the following year he was an artist-in-residence at Dorland Mountain Arts Colony. Since 1992, he has had numerous one-person and group showings. Visual Haiku, an installation of photographic poems, will be showing at the University of Bridgeport in November and December, and at the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art, Grand Rapids, MI in winter 1998. He is also at work on a novel.