Kei Hara | Duet — Asian Contemporary
Kei Hara reviews "Duet — Asian Contemporary," a joint exhibition by Three Shadows Xiamen Photography Art Centre and Tokyo Photographic Art Museum.Summary
This article is an exhibition review by Kei Hara. "Duet — Asian Contemporary," a joint exhibition by Three Shadows Xiamen Photography Art Centre and Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, presents photography and video by six artists from China and Japan, combining images shot in different lands to bring out multiple, partially overlapping narratives. The title "Duet" suggests a Japan-China pairing, yet the works reveal pairs bound by relationships other than nationality.
Toshiya Murakoshi has photographed the landscapes of Fukushima Prefecture, including his hometown of Sukagawa, for about 20 years, turning ordinary scenes into serene landscapes; with no people visible in the exhibited works, attention to detail and negative space instead evokes the lives and presences that once were there. Wang Tuo presents "Fireworks" and "Tungus" from his "Northeast Tetralogy," shot in his native Northeast China, proposing "pan-shamanization" as a concept in which the human body becomes a medium of historical consciousness, excavating memories woven across complex times and lands. Sui Taka's "Odes" photographs the present state of landscapes sung of in the Book of Songs, sharing with Murakoshi a painterly, Pictorialist beauty but differing in the relationship between language and image. Luo Yang photographs women of her generation raised under the one-child policy and reform and opening-up, focusing on identity conflicts. fumiko imano's "le fumistol" is based on seven days of quarantine at a five-star Paris hotel during the pandemic, creating a dreamlike double fiction. Jiang Pengyi's "Dark Addiction 29H19′06″" records firefly light trails directly on film without a camera, returning to photography's material principle as drawing with light.
What underlies all six artists' works is a sense of re-examining, through the camera, the normative perspectives shaped by nation and culture and one's own gaze that sometimes identifies with them. Citing John Berger, the review argues that the exhibition's pairs arise not only from the artists' nationalities but also from the viewer's imagination in finding meaning in an image.
(Source：artscape)