KINGYO-BU: the goldfish club

Payphones are mostly a thing of the past and are nowadays only really used for emergencies or in crime movies. Despite this, Japan still has a relatively high number of public phone booths hanging around their cities. While for most of us they’ve simply faded into the scenery of daily life, others look at these obsolete monoliths and see an opportunity for artistic expression.

In 2012, the KINGYOBU (translating to “goldfish club”) transformed several phone booths in the city of Osaka into standing aquariums. These installations provided a unique way to break up the monotony of city life and take something outmoded and give it an entirely new purpose. For those passing through a mostly grey city, the shimmering reflections of sunlight off of scales is impossible to ignore. In this way, the artwork forces one to stop, detach from routine and take a moment to appreciate the aesthetic beauty of the fish.

It’s creative installations like this that are needed more and more in our megapolises like Tokyo. The endless noise, the long commutes and the towering structures around us can be exhausting and overwhelm even the best of us. It’s important to find ways to occasionally break away from this and appreciate the more simple pleasures in life.

Unfortunately, the installations were removed in 2018 in the midst of a copyright case filed by Nobuki Yamamoto - an artist who had created a similar artwork in 2000. While Osaka’s phone booth aquariums may be gone, we need to push artists to continue to explore such public installations in our cities.

(Photos via Kingyobu Facebook page)