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13/6/2014

Tokyo2020

Christophe Guye Galerie, Zurich

Christophe Guye Galerie is pleased to present its upcoming group exhibition TOKYO2020. An exciting cross-section of 27 newest photographic works from Japan. Kosuke, Yoshinori Mizutani, Kazuna Taguchi, Ayaka Yamamoto, Wataru Yamamoto, and Daisuke Yokota are among the most interesting young talents of the Japanese photographic art scene. The exhibition is co-curated by IMA Tokyo.

Since the 1990s, after half a century of chasing after the West in the post-war period, Japan began to globally disseminate its own cultural expression. Japan’s unique cultural output has been particularly noteworthy in architecture, animation, comic and fashion. Japanese photography too has become established as a unique cultural product. The Western art world has passionately embraced the works of Nobuyoshi Araki and Daido Moriyama since the early 1990s. Soon after, younger star photographers, such as HIROMIX, who is intimately connected to Tokyo’s subculture, also gained wide recognition. In the 2000s, a number of photographers including Rinko Kawauchi, Tomoko Sawada and Lieko Shiga received strong acclaim one after another. On the other hand, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Yasumasa Morimura, whose work are understood in the context of contemporary art, continued to exert a strong presence. Meanwhile, with the support of British photographer and Japanese photo expert Martin Parr, Japanese photography has become a major part of the global culture of photography. Young Japanese photographers of the succeeding generation are currently jockeying for positions in the art world. This generation of photographers is producing work in unparalleled volume and quality. They are independently producing ‘zines’ and books and participating in art fairs to network and launch their careers. For the current exhibition Christophe Guye Galerie and IMA Tokyo selected six young photographers, whom their see as the future leaders of photography. Their works suggest new expressive possibilities that flexibly mix the domestic traditions of personal and street photography with those for foreign conceptual photography. They are all, however, trying to surmount the past to take on new creative challenges in various ways.



KOSUKE (*1986, Japan) ''It is the existence of innovators and creators of the past that allows me to produce works today. Previous works and their interpretation inform the works of any given period including the current one. Today, we have access to wonderful works of the past and we can learn much from the artists that made the works. I believe it is important to know about works of the past. In principle, I respect all of the artists that I have studied, but Man Ray, Mario Giacomelli, and André Kertész’s works have been especially influential on my work. I am strongly drawn to the unique atmosphere of their works. I also feel that it is important to study the works, concepts, sensibilities, and methods of contemporary artists. My aim is to add my unique perspectives and sensibilities to works derived from other works. To do so, I believe it is important to preserve photography’s essential beauty, character and dignity.'

The 1986 born artist Kosuke graduated from the Photography department at Tokyo Polytechnic University in 2009. A year before he won the Konica Minolta Foto Premio Prize and therefore had a solo exhibition at the Konica Minolta Plaza in Tokyo. In these multi-exposure works, the technique of multi-exposure is unimportant for the artist. Multi-exposure is simply a means to the ends of producing images marked by his unique sensibility and atmosphere. This “WARNING” turns into a unique world when he imbue the images he shot on film with emotions in the darkroom



Yoshinori MIZUTANI (*1987, Japan) 'The themes of my work are the everyday and the familiar. What is familiar to me, however, could be new to the viewer. It could also be revelatory or something previously overlooked. It is the viewers’ varied responses to and interpretations of images, which makes photography interesting.'

The 1987 in Fukui Pref. born artist Yoshinori Mizutani graduated from the Tokyo College of Photography in 2012. In 2013 he won the Tokyo Frontline Photo Award and the Japan Photo Award 2013. His foray into photography is fairly recent, he started 4 years ago. Nonetheless, his photographs do demonstrate an innate understanding of how forms, colours, textures and depth translate to the pictoral plane. He is working with a visual vocabulary that has been well established by the work of many photographers active today. Mizutani’s work serves as a good gauge of the visual tropes and photographic styles hat are prevalent among young photographers active in Tokyo today. He uses a simple digital camera and takes a lot of images. He is a real snap shooter in present-day.


Kazuna TAGUCHI (*1987, Japan) 'To make latent richness permeate a single sheet of photographic paper. Sight captures the immediate and complete. Much of understanding depends on sight. However, a world constructed solely by sight would have its weakness: Sight satisfies us. When a person is suddenly thrown into a dark cave, they cautiously strech out their arms to measure the extent of their surroundings. Or, they may call out in an attempt to plumb the depth of the cavern. By so doing, imagination explores the cave from end to end. If a light were to shine into the cave, they could immediately grasp its appearance. And they would even be relieved that there is nothing more to it than is illuminated, they would dismiss the depths that the light does not reach. The voice released earlier is still echoing in the darkness, though. When it comes to applying words to this hidden richness, it always eludes us. Even if the limitations of words lie in this illuminated knowledge, it is not the case that this knowledge as a whole gives birth to a work. Suppose that while a ship is sailing, something might break. However, it is not possible to return to the harbour every time something goes wrong. There are emergencies in which the boat may sink on its way back. Therefore it is necessary for the ship to repair itself while at sea. If returning to the port, the ship would always recover its original form. By contrast, there is no reliable knowledge in the solitude of the sea, so only the sea and the boat create and break meanings again and again. In the same way, my works always surpass my knowledge, drift away from me, and give some suggestions even to me.'

Born in Tokyo, Japan in 1979. Graduated with a BFA in painting from Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music in 2003, and was awarded the University's Purchase Prize (Graduation Exhibition). In the same year she received the university's Ohashi Memorial Prize and was selected for a Holbein Scholarship. She has also recently received a scholarship in the Agency for Cultural Affairs’ Program of Overseas Study for Upcoming Artists and is planning to reside in Vienna. In 2008 she won the Namura Priza and in 2010 The Gotoh Memorial Prize Foudation Newcomer’s prize of art. Major solo exhibitions include “It is as it is” at ShugoArts 2009 and ’Half in Gray’ at void + 2009. Taguchi gained significant attention from the group exhibitions, 'Chaosmos '05 -Unreal Reality’, shown at the Sakura City Museum of Art, 2005, ’Trace Elements’ at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery 2008 and The Performance Space, Sydney 2008, ’ somewhere between me and this world Japanese contemporary photography’ at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography 2012 and ’sleeping Beauty’, Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Hiroshima 2014. Kazuna Taguchi has attracted international attention for her ability to blur the border between photography and painting. Her work involves creating a monochrome acrylic painting that is then photographed to produce a finished image in what has been described as "an alchemy-like manner that manipulates painting and photography", (Kyoji Maeda, 17 Feb, 2006, evening edition, Yomiuri Shimbun). The result ensures a peculiar other-worldliness that is central to the attraction of Taguchi's work.

Ayaka YAMAMOTO (*1987, Japan) ' 'I want to be completely enchanted and swayed by the single sheet of skin that covers living beings. When the transmission of thought through words breaks off, I melt her name with the sensation of my entire body. As a sound which does not reach words flows out, slowly, the impossible-to-translate image of a female figure rises up.’

Ayaka Yamamoto was born in 1983 in Kobe, where she lives and works today. She began studying painting in college, but she gradually moved towards performance and video art, both of which she produced using her body. In 2004, while studying abroad in San Francisco, she started taking photographs. In 2012 she won the Co-Grand Prize of Portfolio Audition from Higashikawa Photo Festival and in 2006 the Honorable Mention from New Cosmos of Photography, selected by Nobuyoshi Araki. Her works where shown in several group exhibitions for e.g. at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, 2006, Higashikawa International Photo Festival, Hokkaido, 2011, Gothe Insitute, Riga, 2012 and at Taka Ishii Gallery, 2013. Yamamoto prepares all of the outfits for her shooting only after she arrives at her destination. Since all of her photographs are made with natural light, Yamamoto always picks locations outside of major cities. Her subjects and settings are also selected entirely on location, through communication with the people who live there. Rather than communicating with words, Yamamoto uses gestures and sounds to pick settings and outfits together with her subjects. Certainly, by taking a photograph of a person without their normal clothes, the photographs take on something of a timeless, stateless air. After going through so many steps of the shooting process together, though, it would be difficult to say precisely to whom these images belong. The nameless subjects existing in these photographs cannot easily become the property of the audience, much less the photographer: they resist such direct connections. Through this unstable relationship, Yamamoto richly awakens the possibilities of photography.

Wataru YAMAMOTO (*1986, Japan) 
'I document nature as a psychological image that is continuously transformed by relations between the self, objects, and time. I study the examination of nature in contemporary urban societies and the representation of nature through the photographic medium to decipher the diverse meanings of the concept of “nature.” In all of my works, I document the phenomena that are produced through the relation between humans and nature instead of positioning nature in opposition to modern artifice. In other words, I aim to document neither humans nor nature but what exists between them. It is the essential ambiguity of photography, as both an optical process of “writing with light” and psychological representational technique of “copying truth,” which I use to document such images. All of my works are an attempt to answer whether it is possible to document ambiguity.’

Wataru Yamamoto is currently finishing up a Master’s degree at Tama Art University. 2013 he had his solo exhibition ‘Drawing a Line’ at the photographer’s gallery, Tokyo and ‘Plane Tree Observations’ at the Yumiko Chiba Associates Viewing Room Shinjuku, Tokyo. His works where shown in group exhibitions at the Yokohama Museum of Art, Yokohama, 2010 and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, 2011. In a series titled “Leaf of Electric Light,” currently part of the Bio Art exhibition, Yamamoto uses a process known as Kirlian photography to create ghostly, ephemeral images of leaves. Originally thought to be able to capture some form of mystical energy field, or aura, of living organisms, Kirlian photography involves using high voltage to generate an electric discharge of an object, which is then captured on film. Although science has largely debunked the myth of the so-called energy fields portrayed, the process – as Yamamoto proves – is still useful in photographing objects in new light.

Daisuke YOKOTA (*1983, Japan) 
'I look at a photograph. It’s a photograph I took in the past. It was not so long ago that I took the photograph. Enough time has passed, however, that I cannot clearly recall the time when I shot the photograph. What was I thinking when I took this photograph? I probably did not mean anything special, but I must have been conscious of something. What was that consciousness? I cannot recall. Or perhaps I no longer know such consciousness. If I shot the photograph, I must have been present at the scene in which the photograph was taken. The photograph exists as a connection between the photographic subject, camera, and me. The photograph remains mainly unchanged, while experience changes memory. The memory and the photograph were created in the same place but they exist differently in time. The past appears fixed, but transforms according to changes in my consciousness.'

Daisuke Yokota was born in Saitama, Japan, 1983. Graduated from the Nippon photography institute in 2003. Selected the honourable mention of ‘the 31st Canon New Cosmos of Photography’ in 2008, and the grand prix of ‘1_Wall Award’. Yokota had his solo exhibition 'Site/Cloud' at G/P gallery, Tokyo in 2013. He has also been exhibited his works in many shows including ’New Cosmos of Photography Tokyo Exhibition 2008’, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, ‘1_Wall Exhibition’, 2010, Guardian Garden, Tokyo, ‘MP1: Expanded Retina’, 2012, G/P gallery, Tokyo, ‘On the flow’, 2012, G/P gallery, Tokyo. Yokota recently joined the photographic group AM Projects, which features a number of European photographers and is represented by Doha-based East Wing Projects. Currently he is exhibited in a solo exhibtion at FOAM Amsterdam as a selected artist Outset / Unseen Exhibition Fund 2013. Yokota’s photographs look like classic Daido Moriyama images, but he has arrived at his style and method through entirely organic means. He claims director David Lynch and musician Aphex Twin as influences; due to the way they distort sensory information in their respective works. Yokota is attempting to introduce ideas of fade, reverb and echo to photography, and this is what’s led him to his unique approach. To create Back Yard, he used a painstaking method in which he printed out his photographs and re-photographed them up to 10 times. Through an intentionally careless developing technique, he introduced new distortions into the image each time that the film was processed. Along with this process of re-photography, he has also used modified versions of the same image in different projects.

Image: Yoshinori MIZUTANI (*1987, Japan), Untiteld #1, 2010, Archival pigment print, 59,4 x 42 cm ( 23 3/8 x 16 1/2 in. ), Edition of 10

Opening reception: Saturday, 14th June, 3-5pm

Christophe Guye Galerie
Dufourstrasse 31, 8008 Zürich, +41 44 252 01 11
Opening hours: Monday - Friday 10 am - 18 pm, Saturday 11 am - 16 pm

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