城市有幾種光

OM SYSTEM originated in the Olympus imaging business. The brand completed its restructuring in 2021 and formally introduced the OM SYSTEM brand.

Its core technology direction and product positioning have remained clear and consistent: exceptional lightness and mobility. The brand is committed to reducing the size and weight of both camera bodies and system lenses to their practical limits, while delivering robust dust- and splash-resistance and dependable all-weather portability. OM SYSTEM aims to integrate professional photography into everyday life and every corner of outdoor exploration, enabling people to record freely, anytime and anywhere, and breaking the boundary that confines professional camera equipment to specific occasions.

A camera that is genuinely carried takes part in seeing. So instead of asking photographers to demonstrate equipment, we placed the same OM-3 in the hands of five creators working in lighting design, dance and movement, visual art, music and theatre — people who already work with light, time and space, though rarely through photography.

The brief was one line: how many kinds of light does a city hold? No assigned subject, no correct answer, and no obligation to deliver anything resembling “urban photography.”

The OM-3 continues the classic OM design language, drawing its compact form from the Olympus OM cameras of the 1970s while bringing OM SYSTEM’s emphasis on lightness, mobility and reliability into contemporary creative practice.

For this project, what mattered was not a list of features but two dials and one button. The Creative Dial on the front calls up four colour and four monochrome profiles, so a creator decides what a photograph is made of before the shutter is pressed. The CP button on the back opens the computational features — Live ND, Live GND, High Res Shot, HDR, Focus Stacking, Multiple Exposure — without a detour through the menus.

Features describe what is possible, not what was made. None of the twenty-five photographs in this project was taken to demonstrate a feature. If a line must be drawn between the machine and the image, it runs roughly like this: light enough to carry daily, so it is carried; carried, so encounters happen; quick enough when they do, so the moment survives.

This project did not ask five creators to produce the same kind of “urban photography.” They shared only an open question and an OM‑3; subject, method and point of view remained their own. The exhibition emerged afterwards, through the differences between five bodies of work: light as theatrical tension, tidal memory, the trace of a tree, the rhythm of a rainy night, or an opening that returns the eye to the sky.

Common Ground, Boundless Perspectives brings five creators from lighting, dance and movement, visual art, music and theatre to the same city using the OM‑3 and an open question. The project sets neither a prescribed subject nor a standard answer. The camera does not make five ways of seeing alike; it allows each creator’s professional sensibility to become an image. Light emerges not only as a physical phenomenon, but as stage, memory, body, rhythm and a place to belong.

From preparation to this moment, if I had to sum up how this exhibition came into being, I would say: Make the unpredictable unexpectedly amazing.

At the outset, I placed the same open question and an OM-3 in the hands of five creators. I did not know where they would go or what they would see, nor did I ask them to produce a predetermined kind of “urban photography.” Unpredictability was not a flaw in the plan; it was where the project truly began to work.

As their creative disciplines, embodied experiences and ways of seeing entered the camera, outcomes I could not have anticipated gradually formed an exhibition more complete than I had imagined. The OM-3 did not decide their answers. It gave unplanned moments the chance to become unexpected — and unexpectedly remarkable — works.

For OM SYSTEM this was also a question put to ourselves. Equipment companies are used to speaking through features and sample images. But a camera proves its worth only when it lands in hands that did not come for photography, and still carries what those hands perceive. The five creators made nothing for the brand; they simply used the camera — and that is precisely what we hoped would be visible.

A cross-disciplinary urban creation project connecting cultural perspectives, camera experience and public exchange through artworks and process. Here the OM‑3 is not a feature list beside the work, but the camera through which five distinct bodies of work take shape.