Glistening Universe
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2021-02-23T13:32:09-08:00
As Japan gradually recovered from the failure of the bubble economy, photographers in the 1990s enjoyed the heyday of creative freedom. They deem photography less a public manifesto than private expression. A new photographic trend that gave prominence to overexposure, light tone and soft focus started to emerge. Fixing intimate gazes into everyday spirituality, these works exhibit a haiku-inspired lightheartedness and tenderness.
Asako Narahashi (1959-) studied literature at Waseda University, but veered into an artistic career in the eighties after participating in Moriyama Daido’s photography workshop. Later in 1996, she started her own gallery and established Main photo magazine with Miyako Ishiuchi. From 2001 to 2008, she travelled along the coastal sites in Japan and produced her most well-known series “half awake half asleep in the water”, in which she carried 35mm waterproof film cameras under water and let the camera half-submerge on the ocean floor.
“ The process of taking photographs is much more than pursuing a single meaning for me… the ‘eyes deliberately out of focus’ is the way I take pictures, or my instance... I’ve been told that my photographs are as long as the duration of an airplane flight. I thought that was an interesting way of expressing it.” [1]
Trained in the photography department at College of Art at Nihon University, Noguchi Rika (1971-) doesn’t follow the concept-oriented photographic trend that prevailed in art school, instead she regards photography as an experiential medium whose uses could transcend our everyday experiences, like how dreaming and imagination does. In her curious pursuits of the unknown and unexperienced, she develops her own artistic methodology and creates works that focus on the changing, complex sensory perception.
Similarly, Rinko Kawauchi’s (1972-) works demonstrate the poetics of evanescence that annotates life itself. In her "Halo" series, Rinko Kawauchi details the temporality of microlandscapes with calculated subtlety. Refined in light and shade, a subliminal euphoria often colors her subjects. Like a“visual haiku”, the photos are sequenced in open narratives that invite further meditation.
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