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8/6/2012

Chino Otsuka

Huis Marseille, Amsterdam

The self-portrait genre is gaining ground in contemporary photography, and today’s globalised world seems to be giving rise to a new and urgent desire for a personal identity. For the Japanese-born, London-resident photographer Chino Otsuka, the quest for identity is the central theme in a notably autobiographical oeuvre. She approaches her way of ‘being’ through intriguing variations on her own self-depiction. But it is the context, in particular, within which she positions her own presence – or her absence – and the literally seamless ways in which she links the past and the present which make her oeuvre such a compelling ‘lieu de memoire’.

Imagine Finding Me
The imagined and the real, reflection and projection, past and present are all recurring themes and the driving force behind Chino Otsuka’s work. The core of this work is formed by the series Imagine finding me, a series of twelve unique ‘double self‐portraits’ made between 2005 and 2009 which are created around a collection of childhood photographs taken from Otsuka's family album. Here, the older Chino Otsuka uses a digital time machine to revisit her younger self in photographs of journeys she made with her parents as a child. ‘1977 and 2009, Jardin du Luxembourg, France’ runs the caption to one such photo; ‘1982 and 2006, Tokyo, Japan’ another. The Huis Marseille exhibition will be the first occasion that these widely acclaimed photographs making up this series have been shown in full.

‘Memoriography’ and the British Library
The videos she created in 2009 and 2010 entitled Memoriography I and Memoriography II – situated in her doorway in Paris and her street in Kitakamakura, Japan, respectively – deepen the theme explored in Imagine Finding Me. Here, time itself now literally forms part of the work, as the image of the younger Otsuka gradually fades to give way to her older self.
In 2007, a Pearson Creative Research Fellowship gave Chino Otsuka the opportunity to spend a year working with the British Library archives. She explored both the photographic and the sound archives, and combined her discoveries with her own visual and sonic memories. Her work has also been broadened by the incorporation of historical material, as in Memoriography from the British Library, 1906 and 2008, Kamakura, Japan: a 1906 photo from the British Library’s Photography collection, of a lonely figure standing in front of a Buddha statue in a place Otsuka knows well because her grandmother lives close by, inspired her to return to this location. Memoriography from the British Library, 1906 and 2008, Kamakura, Japan combines Otsuka’s self-portrait in the present with the location’s past. The addition of sound yields an experience that gives an even deeper dimension to her work.

Chino Otsuka’s background
Given her remarkable life story, we should not be surprised that the work of Chino Otsuka (Tokyo, 1972) has an autobiographical character. In 1982 she exchanged the strictly traditional Japanese school system for Summerhill School, an alternative boarding school in Suffolk, England founded in the 1920s by the progressive educationalist A. S. Neill. At this school the child’s own wishes are paramount. For the first two years Otsuka attended no lessons at all, but by the time she left the school she had gained certificates in English, Photography and Chemistry. She went on to study photography in London, University of Westminster (BA in Film, Video and Photographic Arts) and at the Royal College of Art (MA in Fine Art Photography).
Chino Otsuka belongs to the first generation of young Japanese who left the Japanese education system at an early age to study abroad. In Japan Otsuka has published four books. The first book on these years at Summerhill School, Chino’s Diary (1987), which she wrote at the age of 15, is still widely read in Japanese schools. In the photographic series Summer (2001) she revisits the site and stages self-portraits. Her photographs are carefully constructed to place an emphasis on the relationship of the figure to a specific space. She does this by employing techniques used in cinema and film making such as specific lighting, staging and narrative to allow viewers to develop an emotional response to her work. Summer conveys a sense of fleeting time and capturing the memory of endless English summers. In 2005 Huis Marseille exhibited this series as part of its exhibition Made in Britain.

Chino Otsuka’s career
In 1997 Chino Otsuka’s photography graduation projects Deep Fried and Frozen caught the eye of the late fashion editor Isabella Blow. Otsuka worked on number of fashion projects; together with her partner Norihide Mizuguchi, a specialist in digital arts, they collaborated with Isabella Blow for the Sunday Times Style Magazine.
Today Chino Otsuka continues to explore the relationship between photography and memory. For Otsuka, memory is a form of storytelling and this narrative element is very important throughout her work. The series Tokyo 4-3-4-506 (1999), for instance, was made in the Tokyo flat where Otsuka once lived with her parents. In Generations (2000), which was inspired by traditional Japanese film stills, she appears together with both her mother and grandmother. In Family Reunion (1998), made in Arles, reflective surfaces project blurred, brittle images of Otsuka in the company of her long divorced parents. In the more recent series Photo Album (2011–2012), she reproduces the pages of photo album. The pages have all had photographs removed from them, leaving captions, photo-corners and a faded outline from where the picture lay. As Otsuka describes, “By imagining the invisible images that once filled these empty pages. By photographing something that isn’t there, something that I cannot see, I’m recreating a new image, a new memory”

Otsuka has exhibited her work throughout Europe, as well as in the United Sates, China and Japan, and her work is held in several public and private collections. Such as Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), US, The Wilson Centre for Photography, UK, Mario Testino Collection
and National Media Museum, UK.

A World of Memories
Huis Marseille is presenting the first retrospective of Chino Otsuka’s work over the last ten years. The exhibition A World of Memories also marks the publication of a new book, Chino Otsuka: Photo Album (€35, Dewi Lewis Publishing/The Wilson Centre for Photography), with texts by Els Barents and Greg Hobson.
In 2012 Chino Otsuka will also be contributing to the group exhibition Somewhere between me and this world – Japanese contemporary photography. This will be shown from 10 to 31 October 2012 in the Hong Kong Arts Centre and will then move on to the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, where it will be on show from 8 December 2012 until 27 January 2013.

Press contact: Wannes Ketelaars by telephone on +31-(0)20-5318980 or by email at wannesketelaars@huismarseille.nl

Opening
The exhibition A World of Memories will be opened between 5pm and 7pm on Saturday 9 June 2012 by Els Barents, director of Huis Marseille, Museum for Photography.

Huis Marseille
Keizersgracht 401 - 1016 EK Amsterdam
Opening hours tuesday–sunday 11–18 hr

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