Archives for category: Photographer

On occasion of the exhibition “Shomei Tomatsu – Skin of a Nation”1 at the Fotomuseum Winterthur, the Museum hosts the symposium
“Photography and Lifestyle in Japan from 1945 until Today”
on Friday October 27.

Shomei Tomatsu: «Oshima Eiko, Actress in the Film Shiiku (Priz Stock)», 1961

I am invited to give a lecture on “Contemporary Japanese Photography and Lifestyle” and my talk is schedule just before the party. :-)
By the way, during the party there will be a slide show arranged by the Mariko Takeuchi, Tokyo: “20 new Japanese Photographers”
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Notes

  1. ↑1 See my my earlier post about the exhibition when it started in New York.

It’s not the first time that I am mentioning Rinko Kawauchi in my blog, but this has a special reason.
I think it was 2003 when Markus Schaden, my local photobook dealer showed me a small photobook by a Japanese women photographer whom I had not heard of at that time. It was “Utatane” (Siesta) by Rinko Kawauchi. “Utatane” caught my attention immediately, since her photography was so much different to any photographer of her generation.”Utatane” is included in vol. 2 of “The Photobook: A History” by Martin Parr and Gerry Badger. See my previous post.

Rinko Kawauchi

Rinko Kawauchi had her first exhibition at the end 1990s only a few years after a new – not to say the first – generation of women photographer had emerged in Japan. Before the mid 1990s the Japanese photography scene was completely male dominated, but this changed almost over night when the first onna no ko shashinka (girly photographers) entered the scene. Those onna no ko shashinka mostly did a kind of subjective documentary photography influenced by Nan Goldin and Nobuyoshi Araki. These women, amongst them most famous Hiromix and Yurie Nagashima, talked mainly about their own lives. With their spontaneous and direct and dairy like style the young photographers opened a new narrative in the Japanese photography, but soon they reached their own limitations, because of their self centred approach on reality.

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While I wrote my last post about Tomoko Sawada I became curious about her early works which I haven’t seen yet. Katsuya Ishida the owner of MEM gallery had been so kind to send me three of her early works currently exhibited at his gallery. The early works, done while Sawada was still a student at the Seian College of Art and Design, seem to be more playful than her later conceptual series, but they are already very strong in my opinion.

Tomoko Sawada: «Doll 1», 1996

Tomoko Sawada: «EarlyDays 15», 1997

Tomoko Sawada: «Early Days 26», 1997

PS: For visitors of Osaka MEM gallery is definitely a place to go. IMHO it’s one of the best photo galleries in Kansai

This is my second post about Tomoko Sawada about whom I wrote two years ago already. Currently she has two exhibitions at KPO Gallery at Kirin PlazaKirin Plaza itself is worth a visit. The building – which gives the impression of a huge sculpture – by the architect Shin Takamtsu is a landmark building in Osaka. Scenes from the movie “Black Rain” were filmed at Kirin Plaza and at MEM gallery in Osaka (until Sept. 3).

“Masquerade” at KPO shows Tomoko Sawada in the guise of a few hundred different self-created identities. The exhibition includes the series “OMIAI” (2001), “Cover/Face” (2002) and “Recruit” (2006). A new book by Sawada with the title of the exhibition “Masquerade” is due to be published soon. In conjunction with the exhibition at Kirin Plaza, MEM gallery exhibits “Early Works” from 1996/97 which have not been shown to the public before.

A review in the Japan Times pointed me to the exhibition at KPO.Just as a side note: The Japan Times is the only English language newspaper in Japan which carries regular exhibitions reviews on Western and Japanese arts. But the lack of reviews/discussions on modern and contemporary art is not limited to English newspapers. It seems that the Japanese art world – in contrary to Europe and the USA – is quite isolated from the public discourse, since for example the Japanese newspapers don’t carry feature pages on art neither. By the way: the observation that the contemporary art world is isolated from the mainstream of the Japanese society is one pillar of Takashi Murakami’s controversially discussed “Superflat” art theory.

“All of them are me,” she said in a 2004 interview with NY Arts Magazine, “I don’t try to be someone else.”
That being so, her body of work is a phantasmagoric play of self-imaging that is volatile and restless in the infinite adjustments of pose, clothing, hair and makeup.

Tomoko Sawada «Omiai», 2001
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Bear