The cosmetics brand Shiseido has long been an advocate of artists with rising stars. The current show at its Ginza gallery, Anneke Hymmen & Kumi Hiroi, Tokuko Ushioda, Mari Katayama, Maiko Haruki, Mayumi Hosokura, and Your Perspectives, features up-and-coming photographers. Anneke Hymmen & Kumi Hiroi work as a pair reconstructing the language and imagery of advertising; Tokuko Ushioda photographs books and their environments; Mari Katayama, co-winner of the most recent Kimura Ihei Award, takes self-portraits with her prostheses and hand-sewn objects; Maiko Haruki questions what it means to "see" in obscurely framed, over- and under-exposed shots; Mayumi Hosokura explores notions of boundaries and the body. This exhibition dedicates separate spaces to each artist/unit and leaves it up to the viewer to fill in the blanks about connections and cohesive meanings -- hence the "and your perspectives" in the title. What the works all share is a sharpness of ideas and techniques.

Hymmen & Hiroi present ten photographs accompanied by texts written on the wall. The duo has created new images based on advertisements without seeing the original ads, going only on key phrases describing them. A Shiseido ad shows a woman dressed in red with red lipstick striding boldly down the street. In a photograph to its left, another woman, also wearing red but with no makeup, stares unapologetically into the camera. The text on the wall (in Japanese) reads: "Which has a feeling of confidence? The red lipstick? Or no lipstick?" The "answer" is a matter of perspective, of course, but in this way, Hymmen & Hiroi make us question our assumptions about beauty, commercialism, womanhood, and the images we project.

One of the most rewarding aspects of Hymmen & Hiroi's contribution to the show comes from QR codes on the wall, which link to pages with dialogues between the two artists and short stories by photography essayist Akiko Otake, who imagines narratives based on the images. English is provided by the skilled literary translator Polly Barton.

Maiko Haruki deliberately under- or over-exposes her photographs to create blocks of black and white. She also shows an interest in treating photographs as objects. For this show, she has installed a white wall with square holes cut into it. One side of the wall is blank while the other side intersperses the openings with Haruki's photographs. These works come from three series of C prints: okinawa, I never know that I know, and A certain composition of eyes. The images offer glimpses of scenes taken from a range of angles -- doorframes, people by the water, taxidermied animals at Tokyo's National Museum of Nature and Science. Like the wall itself, these works demonstrate her tendency to obscure the main subject, which gets to the multifaceted nature of how much we actually perceive when we view something. Haruki has stated: "I want people to think about what 'look' actually means . . . 'Look' can be understood in many different ways such as observe, view, or regard. Since I couldn't express it well in words, I used photographs to show it." By pointing to what we're missing when we assume we "see" the entirety of something, Haruki widens our perspective. Her work can also be seen at the Domani exhibition at The National Art Center, Tokyo through 7 March.

Mayumi Hosokura, an increasingly acclaimed figure on Japan's photography scene, also concerns herself with the limitations of our viewpoints. Her recent series newskin presents digitally collaged images of male sculptures, gay magazine pages, and internet selfies along with videos of these shots before they were spliced and rearranged. As the exhibition materials explain, the photographs and videos "complement each other to present the original photographs, but it is not possible to grasp the whole picture at a glance, which seems to indicate the difficulty of 'seeing.'"

Newskin also continues with Hosokura's interest in humanity's "borders," whether they be between genders or organic states. Her previous work Transparency Is the New Mystery juxtaposed photographs of nudes and crystal formations, highlighting the ephemeral nature of both organic and mineral matter. Newskin, also in black and white, seems to suggest that gender, sexuality -- and maybe even our concepts of humanity -- are constructions that can be adapted, donned, and shed.

Mari Katayama, too, is interested in trying things on. Born with a condition called tibial hemimelia that stunted her leg development and gave her a cleft palm, she makes costumes and objects to go with her prostheses, photographing herself with these creations in self-portraits. Having fashioned herself as characters from literature and art, such as Shakespeare's Ophelia and Botticelli's Birth of Venus, Katayama views her work as a type of fantasy-based role-play or a performance of identity. This exhibition features her series shadow puppet, which shows her striking various poses and personas and doing shadow play with her hands. The works have an ambience of mystery that allows us to imagine Katayama as anyone she might invent or reinvent herself as. She seems to be a puppet master of her own image.

Tokuko Ushioda documents objects. With Ice Box she photographed refrigerators from several households. For Bibliotheca, the series exhibited here, for which she received the Domon Ken Award, she spent over two decades photographing books as art objects in settings including libraries, private collections, and publishing offices. The 20 works chosen for display at Shiseido reflect her ideas about boundaries and being female. Subjects include books describing a woman appearing as a character in a Japanese fairy tale, a Hawaiian woman encountered on Captain Cook's voyages, and a philanderer's diary resented by his wife. Be sure to read the descriptions of each photo linked to the QR code. Ushioda's blending of subject and context and historical fact with personal accounts makes these poetic images even more intriguing.

Shiseido Gallery is to be commended for bringing together such a diverse and talented group of photographers. Some, like Haruki and Hosokura, take an oblique approach to the gaze, while others, such as Hymmen & Hiroi and Katayama, tackle their subjects head-on. From my perspective, the acuity of concepts and the richness of creativity are the common denominators of the show. These photographs reveal to us how porous boundaries -- whether between images and realities, countries and cultures, or ourselves and others -- can be. Walking through each section opens up new worlds that make us feel connected with a larger one.