When I first saw Tanaka’s “blocks” series artworks, it looked like a hallucination. Hallucination of colorful buildings appeared in a white desert. As you may have noticed, these are colored toy blocks settled in a white space and photographed from the same eye level. Isn’t it interesting that human eyes can see the blocks as if they are large buildings? Tanaka’s artworks are like testing our senses of what we see and how we see it.

Tanaka uses photograph as a medium but it doesn’t sound accurate to call him as a photographer who captures one moment or objects in the scenery. He plans precisely how to photograph the image in a frame by deeply thinking what he wants to express through his works. In this “blocks” series, he was thinking of how to construct a scenery with minimal elements which are height, width and depth, and came up with the idea of using toy blocks. Simplifying the theme is always a core step of his work.

In the “Untitled Compositions” series, Tanaka went into an abolished school and scanned drawings students left on the wall in a classroom. He digitally reduced the resolution of the image in extremely low level and printed on a paper. Then he put them on a school desk to photograph it. Although it may look like a digitally manipulated artwork, simply stating, it is a photograph of papers. But what makes this works interesting is that he included the shadows of school windows in the work. You can see the gray shadows randomly appeared in the work.The drawings he used were created by somebody in the past but the shadows casting on the paper were captured right at the time he photographed. Times are crossing upon the work.

Moreover, I simply enjoy the color of his works too. They are bright and happy but soft and gentle at the same time. I could have a chance to talk with Tanaka and he was just exactly a person like that. He was sincerely explaining about his work and answering to my questions honestly with excitement. How is his works seen in your eyes?

text by Rasa Tsuda

When I visited Tanaami’s exhibition in the end of October, these vivid colors jumped into my eyes standing out from the bright white gallery space. I love Tanaami’s strong coloration and these prints were just as strong as his painting. Moreover, Tanaami is now 75 year old. I respect the energy creating such a powerful artworks at his age.

As you can see in the title of the work, “bridge” was the main theme of the exhibition. For Tanaami, bridge was a place strongly connected with death. He saw dead bodies along he bridge during a nighttime air raid in WWII when he was 9 year old. In a movie, the severed was hung along the bridge, dead bodies were hidden under the bridge and brooding lovers threw themselves from railing in miserable double suicides. Bridge was always related with death and Tanaami thought it is cultural feature of bridge in Japan.

Tanaami, himself has experienced the fear of death through war and heavy disease. During the war, he saw the light from the bombs reflected off the scale of grandfather’s goldfish. Pine trees, seemingly pregnant with skull and Popeye forms , are based on hallucinations Tanaami witnessed when he nearly died from a pulminary edema at age 44. During his illness, for more than a week he suffered nightmares about pine trees tightening around him. These motifs are seen in his artworks too.

The galleriest, Nanzuka told me that when he tried to show Tanaami the photos he took in the Tohoku area damaged by the 311 earthquake and tsunami, Tanaami refused to see them. The photo reminds him of what he saw during the war since the view was too similar to it. After Tanaami had came back from place of wartime evacuation, there was literally nothing remaining in the town and the view was completely changed. Flat horizon and blue sky were just existing there. He may be still in the middle of trauma.

There are many artists dealing with the theme of death. While some artists focus on emotional part of death, like fear and sadness, for me, Tanaami’s expression is focusing on the energy of death. The energy of fighting against the death.

text by Rasa Tsuda

We have introduced the artwork series “a View” which was in black and white. Compared to that, this series “For Grey” is in color. Shibata answered about the difference between black/white and color photograph in an interview by eyecurious as below.

“For me colour photography is about atmosphere, whereas with my black and white work I was focused on shape and tonality. In my black and white work by combining those elements of shape and tonality, photography was able to create a different world. I tried to create scenes that people had never seen before. With colour photography the process is more casual, looser. I try to capture an atmosphere.” (from eyecurious)

Color may add more reality in the photograph than black/white since the objects will be recognized as what it is instead of only its shape. Although, Shibata’s color photo is still losing the reality. It is timeless and hard to find any sense of specific place or emotion. He also mentioned about photography compared with painting as below.

“The only elements that you can control are contrast and tonality, light essentially. With painting all the ‘unnecessary’ parts in a scene can be eliminated. With photography, you just have to accept what is there. That is where the difficulty of photography lies. Photography is not something that you can make. It cannot be forced. You have to accept the subject. “ (from eyecurious)

“You have to accept the subject.” This must be the ultimate feature of photography. Accepting the subject may end up capturing a photo which gives us no surprise. However, as you can see in these photos, Shibata shows the scenery from a different point of view. This means he has his own special eye accepting the world.

text by Rasa Tsuda

Tigers are making a circle and look like dancing. This is an artwork created by Hiroshi Fuji, combining each tiger brought from children through the project called “Kaekko (swap)”. “Kaekko” is a project Fuji organized as a place where children could barter toys. Children even manage the “kaekko” shop, and kids who come to “kaekko” without toys can help out, gain points, and trade them for toys. And these tigers were brought from those children. How could children have the same tigers? It is because they were Happy Meal toys that children acquired from McDonald’s.

Fuji has his artistic concept as “ways of transforming existences (thoughts) that are not valued by society into special existences.” He used the tiger toys, which is not much valuable into an new eye catching object which will inspire the people. He used many of these Happy Ring artworks to create a large installation which makes you feel like in another world.

As an artist, you can see how great drawing technique Fuji has in the artwork “IFH-GT”. This is a drawing of the giraffe tower which was exhibited for the exhibition “Project to make a fictitious character Fujishima Hachijuro” held at The Setouchi International Art Festival 2010. The Setouchi International Art Festival is a contemporary art festival that takes place on multiple islands of the Seto Inland Sea. It was first held in 2010 and it attracted a huge response from hundreds of thousands of visitors. This giraffe was set at the sea side as it is shown in the drawing.

text by Rasa Tsuda

First of all, look at these three artworks briefly. Did you notice something?
Yes, they are impersonated by the same man. And he is the artist himself who created this series of artwork.

Morimura started to impersonate famous figures who already passed by to know how they will see our generation if they were alive. In the process of creating artworks, Morimura learned about their lives and their thoughts since just imitating their appearance was not enough to create this kind of artwork.

“Einstein” and “Marylin” are the iconic figure represents the 20th century in terms of science and movie star. Both field appeared to change our lives in the 20th century. Science created a better living and tragic wars with chemical bombs. Movie stars provided joy in life and sense of beauty or hero. Morimura quoted “In 20th century, while men were active in real life such as science or politics, women were shining in the screen. Compared to that, there is no border of male or female and where they are active at in the 21st century.”

“Mona Lisa” is the artwork came out from the series which he pretends to be famous paintings. He looked not only the original artwork to create this artwork, but also her imitations. The colors of the original work is degraded and he thought the imitations will lead him to better understand the original artwork.

These artworks are made of lenticular lens and you can enjoy two patterns of the faces which appears when you see it from different direction. Just look at each artwork pages to enjoy what is happening on the other side of the work.

text by Rasa Tsuda

We are happy to introduce this new artwork series by Takashi Homma.

What Homma captured this time is McDonald. McDonald is the most famous restaurant chain, maybe most of the people in the world have used at least once in their life time. McDonald was a very close to Homma too. It was in his everyday life.

Homma is famous for capturing a usual life, not a special and sensational thing but as it is. So choosing McDonald as a motif was a natural choice. The interesting point of this new series is that he photographed the shop not in Japan but in US, France and other countries. He might have choosen McDonald as a universal motif of everyday life and be trying to reach directly to people’s mind all around the world.

For this series, Homma printed his works in a large slikscreen print for the first time. Emphasizing the dots and expressing his works in a new way. Surface is not smoothe and looks like an old print printed more than 20 years ago which takes into your memory.

What is your memory about McDonald? How are these shops seen in your eyes?

text by Rasa Tsuda

“BBF64″ by Yuichi Yokoyama

“Boat (part)” by Yuichi Yokoyama

Manga Books in English.

Yokoyama is an artist who uses manga as a medium to express his world. To date, he has produced many manga books, which has gained high acclaim both in and out of Japan. Yuichi Yokoyama’s manga, which he describes as “drawing time”, is a clear departure from common story form manga. Dialog is sparse and onomatopoeias such as “do do do do” and “wa-” are boldly used. In an atmosphere that is uncanny but attractive, cool characters freely move around with a sense of speed. This unique expression that Yokoyama himself describes as “neo-manga” has easily overcome the limits of a two dimensional media to superbly draw “time” and “space”. His work brings fresh surprises and excitement to the viewer and has continued to have great impact extending beyond the genre.

For the artwork “Travle”, this image was taken from Yokoyama’s manga titled “Travel”. In this story, the three men, who are depicted in this piece, travel by train to their destination. The usual comic book onomatopoeias do not appear in this manga, but there is a sense of speed throughout the entire story. The book was printed in black and white, but the artist chose silver for this silkscreen reincarnation. The story seems to tell a tale of travels into the future, and the color aptly portrays that atmosphere.

The image of “BBF64″ was selected from Yokoyama’s artbook “BBF (Baby Boom Final)”, and was reproduced as a slikscreen. The number 64 implies that there are 64 faces in this work, but there are actually more than 100 faces. The faces belong to Yokoyama’s character named “baby” from his comic book titled “Baby Boom”.

“Boat (part)” is a scene from Yokoyama’s manga titled “Baby Boom”. An adult with a bird-like face and a little furry baby chick-like creature sets off across a pond on a boat. Yokoyama chose this scene, because the character “baby” in the right-hand cell of the second row is depicted the cutest here, out of all the drawings of “baby” in the book. Through the manga “Baby Boom”, Yokoyama attempts to convey the humor in cuteness. As he observed innocent children’s adorable behavior, he found a comical side to their cuteness.

I would like to recommend you to read Yokoyama’s manga books too, to immerse your self in his world!

(text by Rasa Tsuda)

These images are not manipulated at all. They are all taken in real sceneries. Toshio Shibata uses his camera to cut out sceneries and to create new images in photographs. Water, grass, rocks, concrete blocks, guardrails or roads simply exist as a pattern in one image. Shibata said, “I never included the sky. Showing the sky would mean going back to depicting landscapes.” He is not capturing a landscape but the image with his high sensitivity.

He also avoids including information about the location of a shoot. One of the images out of the five was taken in the USA and the rest in Japan but it is difficult to tell which one was taken in the US. This also makes the image far from a landscape. With no nationality, no emotion, no time line, these senses of wonder draw our eyes to the image.

These 5 editions were printed along with the book titled “a View”. This book includes 44 images which Shibata took from 1995 to 2007. The book is in a turquoise blue special cover made for this edition. Please check the book and cover in detail on each artworks page.

Even though these are the same black and white photograph as the ones Daido Moriyama takes, what they express is totally different. Shibata’s images are sharp and straight when Moriyama’s images are blurry and rough. I admire artists’ creativity in finding their own expression which comes from the bottom of their hearts.

I enjoy art since it gives us an idea on how to look at things from a different aspect. Shibata’s photos are just like that. We must have seen these sceneries in our life but have passed by without taking any notice. By seeing his work, it looks as if nature and artificial objects are existing nicely together.
(text by Rasa Tsuda)