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9/11/2007

Araki, Miyamoto, Sugimoto

Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg

Contemporary Japanese Photography

Taking as our starting point the extensive group of works by Nobuyoshi Araki in the collection of the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, we present an exhibition of photographs by Japanese artists as a complement to the programmatic exhibition “Japan and the West: Fulfilled Emptiness” being presented in the main hall.

Visitors to Japan are often surprised by the two extremes that define the contemporary appearance and social structure of this island on the eastern edge of Asia. In its sprawling urban conglomerations you can on the one hand get lost in the colourful maze of consumer culture, and on the other encounter the quiet aesthetics of Zen, which has not only influenced traditional Japanese arts and crafts but is also the fundamental formal principle underlying contemporary design and internationally acclaimed Japanese architecture. Renunciation and plenitude, emptiness and (super)abundance shape the face of modern-day Japan. Having concentrated on “fulfilled emptiness” in our exhibition project “Japan and the West”, we now turn the spotlight on three examples of contemporary Japanese photography that reflect this polarity. With their quiet elegance and arresting simplicity, Hiroshi Sugimoto’s restrained images offer a thoughtful response to Araki’s opulent photographs, which celebrate eroticism and the rich diversity of city life.

In addition to the photographs by Nobuyoshi Araki from the collection and other examples of his recent work, a group of photographs by Ryuji Miyamoto will be presented alongside selected works by Hiroshi Sugimoto. During their studies, both of these photographers were greatly influenced by the American art movements of Minimal art and Conceptual art. The defining principle of both Sugimoto’s and Miyamoto’s work is seriality, whereby they pursue individual pictorial ideas over extended periods of time. Araki’s work is strongly inspired by the everyday aesthetics of modern-day Japan and the particular feel of Japanese cities with all their light and dark sides. Our exhibition of photographs by the three artists brings together 130 works from the period 1972–2004.

Born in 1948 in Tokyo, Hiroshi Sugimoto moved to America in 1970 to study at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles. He now lives in New York. Sugimoto’s series of rigorously reduced photographic images invite the use of superlatives: it seems impossible for photographs to be more perfect, more reduced or more lucid than these. The Kunstmuseum is showing several of his “Seascapes” and “Theaters” along with selected works from the series “Hall of Thirty-Three Bays”.

To create the “Seascapes” on show here, which were photographed between 1990 and 2001 at various locations around the world, Sugimoto positioned his camera in such a way that the horizon line divides the photographic images into two equal halves, and all surrounding detail is eliminated. Stillness and timelessness are Sugimoto’s central concerns in this series – or as he puts it: “The work makes you stop and study something. It freezes the world and keeps it there, immobile, open to your research and study. In order to study the world you have to stop it.” The factor of time is also crucial to Sugimoto’s series of “Theaters”, in which the artist has photographed numerous American drive-in cinemas and film theatres from the 1920s and early 1930s. By fixing the camera shutter at a wide-open aperture for the duration of the film screening, the extremely long exposure makes the movie screen stand out as a luminous white rectangle.

In Sugimoto’s work “Hall of Thirty-Three Bays”, 1995 (consisting of 48 photographs, ten of which are being shown in Wolfsburg), the individual images overlap in terms of their subject content. Following lengthy negotiations, Sugimoto persuaded the monks from the famous Sanjusangendo monastery in Kyoto to allow him to photograph the installation of 1000 Buddhist sculptures of Senju Kannon lined up in rows inside the temple. Sugimoto’s photographs create a dizzying sense of endlessness: the statues themselves embody the principle of serial repetition in their non-identical reproduction of a single object, and Sugimoto’s photographic method perpetuates this seriality.

Born in 1947 in Tokyo, Ryuji Miyamoto turns his camera on the suppressed aspect of the transitory nature of architecture. The Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt has a series of 34 photographs by Miyamoto in its permanent collection; these images were captured in the city of Kobe after it was almost completely destroyed by a massive earthquake. Miyamoto’s photographs lend a distinctly sculptural quality to the devastated houses and the materiality of shattered facades, storeys and walls.

Miyamoto generally keeps his camera at the viewer’s eye-level, while varying the distance to the photographed object. His shots are perfectly composed and framed; the complex layering within these images of heaps of rubble, twisted cables and traces of fire damage, combined with the virtually complete absence of people, is what makes these photographs so oppressive and timeless. We know that right up to the moment when everything collapsed, people lived, loved and laughed in the places depicted. And we can already sense that in these sites of devastation and death, soon new houses will be built and people will live again. However, this frozen moment, when it seems as though nobody could ever live here again – the paradoxical moment when the survivors catch their breath before starting over – also makes the viewer stop and think.

Nobuyoshi Araki, who was born in 1940 in Tokyo, had a large solo exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg in 1995. The following year, selected works from his series “Tokyo Novelle” entered the museum collection. The subjects derive almost exclusively from the world in which Araki lives – Tokyo: the city as a landscape, its quarters, streets, drinks vending machines, the sky above the city, portraits of its inhabitants and of dead lizards dragged in by his cat Chiro, the patio of his apartment, still lifes of wilted flowers, graveyards, but above all recurrent images of nudes – predominantly female, and often elaborately bound in bondage ropes. The title of the series “Tokyo Novelle” is programmatic: Araki, who wrote essays and short stories in his youth, and occasionally accompanies his photographic work with short texts, does indeed make his daily photographic excursions around Tokyo in the manner of a first-person narrator. In addition to this famous body of work, the exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg also includes some rarely shown photographs from Araki’s series “The Past”, created in 1972–1973. In this work, too, the urban realm and its inhabitants are the artist’s chosen themes, and by manually advancing the film he attempts to capture two motifs at once from the flood of visual impressions.

There is an almost obscene voluptuousness about one of Araki’s most recent photographic series, “Painting Flowers”, in which he brushes or spatters a variety of blooms and bunches of flowers with paint before photographing them; at times viewers cannot be sure whether what they are looking at is the natural colour of an exotic flower or the result of colour manipulation by the artist. In Nobuyoshi Araki’s art, the floral imagery that is so familiar and widespread in both Eastern and Western culture assumes a cryptic, decadent air.

Image: Nobuyoshi Araki, Untitled (From Painting Flowers), 2004. Cibachrome Print 50 x 60 cm. Courtesy Jablonka Galerie, Köln/Berlin. Foto: Matthias Langer, Braunschweig/Varel © Nobuyoshi Araki

Contact/Press enquiries: Dr. Thomas Köhler, Nicole Schütze; Tel.: + 49 (0)5361 266969, Fax + 49 (0)5361 266966 - tkoehler@kunstmuseum-wolfsburg.de

Dates
Press conference Araki, Miyamoto, Sugimoto: Contemporary Japanese Photography
Thursday, 8 November 2007, 11 a.m.

Exhibition opening Araki, Miyamoto, Sugimoto: Contemporary Japanese Photography
Friday, 9 November 2007, 7 p.m.

Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg
Hollerplatz 1
38440 Wolfsburg, Germany
Opening hours: Tuesday 11 a.m. – 8 p.m.
Wednesday to Sunday 11 a.m. – 6 p.m.
Monday closed
Admission € 6
Yearly season ticket € 30
Concessions € 3
Groups of 12 or more € 3 per person
Family ticket € 12
School groups € 2 per pupil, with practical participation € 3
(guided tour free of charge)

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