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Masao Yamamoto "Kawa=Flow"
Mizuma Action
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Artists
Masao Yamamoto
Mizuma Art Gallery is holding Masao Yamamoto's second solo exhibition in three years, "Kawa-Flow," from July 22nd onwards.
Yamamoto is an artist who works mainly in America and Europe. This year saw his participation in the Krakow Photography Festival in Poland, as well as solo shows in Portland, Atlanta, Milan, Zurich and Antwerp. Following this Tokyo exhibition, shows are planned in Paris, Cologne, Freiburg and Tucson, Arizona.
Yamamoto's photography works are mostly in black and white with a distinctive whiff of age about them, like a fragment of someone's memories that seems to have spilled out of a chest of drawers. His photos are small snapshots, but condense within them enough beauty to take your breath away. Previously, Yamamoto scattered his photos in a collage-like fashion onto walls - twenty or thirty, sometimes several hundred - or else stuffed them into boxes and presented them in the form of an installation. As in his previous solo exhibition, the silent quality of each individual image extended to the entire space of the installation, and the experience of viewing the entire wall was startlingly similar to staring hard at a single photo up close. This relationship of the details to the whole is an evocation of the analogical relationship of oneself to the world. Yamamoto's high acclaim in the West is perhaps due to this "Eastern" or "Japanese" logic or thinking that audiences see in his work.
This exhibition marks a new departure for Yamamoto - instead of the integrated installations from his previous works, here he has framed each image individually. The "kawa" (river) in the title does not refer to the subject of these images, but rather the idea of a boundary or border - not a geographical feature of the terrain, but an emotional or sentimental line: the boundary between this world and the next, for instance, or the "flow" or "current" of human life.
[Image: Masao Yamamoto, "Kawa=Flow #1530" (2009) gelatin silver print, 164x245mm]
Yamamoto is an artist who works mainly in America and Europe. This year saw his participation in the Krakow Photography Festival in Poland, as well as solo shows in Portland, Atlanta, Milan, Zurich and Antwerp. Following this Tokyo exhibition, shows are planned in Paris, Cologne, Freiburg and Tucson, Arizona.
Yamamoto's photography works are mostly in black and white with a distinctive whiff of age about them, like a fragment of someone's memories that seems to have spilled out of a chest of drawers. His photos are small snapshots, but condense within them enough beauty to take your breath away. Previously, Yamamoto scattered his photos in a collage-like fashion onto walls - twenty or thirty, sometimes several hundred - or else stuffed them into boxes and presented them in the form of an installation. As in his previous solo exhibition, the silent quality of each individual image extended to the entire space of the installation, and the experience of viewing the entire wall was startlingly similar to staring hard at a single photo up close. This relationship of the details to the whole is an evocation of the analogical relationship of oneself to the world. Yamamoto's high acclaim in the West is perhaps due to this "Eastern" or "Japanese" logic or thinking that audiences see in his work.
This exhibition marks a new departure for Yamamoto - instead of the integrated installations from his previous works, here he has framed each image individually. The "kawa" (river) in the title does not refer to the subject of these images, but rather the idea of a boundary or border - not a geographical feature of the terrain, but an emotional or sentimental line: the boundary between this world and the next, for instance, or the "flow" or "current" of human life.
[Image: Masao Yamamoto, "Kawa=Flow #1530" (2009) gelatin silver print, 164x245mm]
Schedule | Jul 22 (Wed) 2009-Aug 22 (Sat) 2009 Opening Hours Information
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| Fee | Free | ||||
| Venue | Mizuma Action http://www.mizuma-art.co.jp/top_e.php  | ||||
| Location | 2F Kagura Bldg., 3-13 Ichigayatamachi, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo 162-0843 | ||||
| Access | 5 minute walk from exit 5 at Ichigaya Station on the Yurakucho and Namboku lines, 8 minute walk from the West exit of JR Iidabashi Station, 8 minute walk from exit B2a at Iidabashi Station on the Tozai, Yurakucho and Namboku lines. | ||||
| Phone | 03-3268-2500 | ||||
| Related images | Click on the image to enlarge it |
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