FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Shibui: Six Japanese Photographers, 1920s to 2000
April 23 – June 20, 2009
7358 Beverly Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA. 90036
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Hours, Tuesday – Saturday, 11am-5pm
Geeshu Ogawa, Girl with Braids, 1920s, Silver Print with Varnish.
The Stephen Cohen Gallery is pleased to announce Shibui: Six Japanese Photographers from 1920s to 2000. The exhibition will run from April 23 – June 20, and will include works by Daido Moriyama, Ken Ohara, Kiichi Asano, Yoshiyuki Iwase, Gesshu Ogawa, and Mikiko Hara. The majority of the images are black & white, and were taken almost exclusively in Japan – from Ogawa’s 1920s toned Pictorialist landscapes and portraits to Moriyama’s edgy, ominous street scenes and everyday moments ripe with desire. Hara’s snapshot-style color portraits and suburban landscapes will be showcased in the Viewing Room.
The Westernization of Japan began the moment Admiral Perry’s Black Ships arrived in Tokyo Harbor with camera on board in 1854. While foreign photographers began documenting every aspect of Japanese culture, awestruck Japanese society simultaneously caught glimpses of the West. Japanese photographers quickly took up the relatively new medium. First captured on film in 1872 in traditional dress, the Emperor was portrayed in Western military attire the very next year, with an image from this sitting becoming his official portrait. Ardent fascination with western ways continued with a curious persistence, initiating the Eastern Islands cultural break with isolationism. Japanese interest in Western culture was further enhanced after the loss of World War II, when American occupation sent the culture into a tailspin, and the poetic, careful grace of the old traditions were eagerly discarded for the modern, industrialized fast-lane of the West.
Having been exposed to European Pictorialism by the 1880s, Japanese photographers likewise depicted a hazy, idealized beauty of life as a poetic dream. Portraiture and landscapes were the staples of the time. Gesshu Ogawa’s work from the 1920s is infused with a painterly, lyrical sensibility. Ogawa specialized in portraits, having set up a studio in 1927. Apparently made for doting parents, many of the sitters in his photographs are of angelic children, often surprisingly pictured in western dress. Many images are cropped to mimic the shape of the traditional, long, narrow Japanese scroll, but stylistic and compositional influences from the West are evident.
Relentless wars also caused traditional rituals to be discarded. Yoshiyuki Iwase and Kiichi Asano both unintentionally documented disappearing cultural traditions that time and history were soon to dispose of. Iwase’s proximity to the ocean resulted in a poetic eulogy to the “ama” divers (sea women) from 1930 to 1960, when they were replaced by technology. Iwase received significant recognition in Japan for this work, winning numerous prizes.
Asano, like Iwase, practiced photography as an avocation and similarly, won much acclaim in Japan for his documentation of traditional mores and lifestyles. Influenced by novelist Yasunari Kawabata, his images of the Snow Country are expressive impressionistic depictions of a life in the northern island, which like the snow he photographed, disappeared, shortly thereafter. Asano’s other two bodies of work, Kyoto and the Geishas of the Gion Quarter are loving looks at fading, formal, ritualistic traditions that could not be maintained against the wave of Western thought and technology that was inundating the culture.
The next generation saw themselves not as photographers, but artists. The physical presence of the occupying Americans offered the impressionable youth an out – the freedom to express one’s individuality.
One of the most aggressively expressive of the young turks, Daido Moriyama, member of the Provoke Group, took Japanese photography into a visceral direction, previously unexplored in such a gritty and aggressive manner. Heartily embracing the West, he personally expressed what Japan itself was experiencing. Moriyama’s groundbreaking work is true to his emotional and poetic core. He brought a new aesthetic, a grainy, rough, off-kilter expressionism that forged new ground. A contemporary, Ken Ohara left Japan for the US in 1960 for freedom and art. His groundbreaking book “ONE” was published in 1970 – an amalgam of Buddhist thought and New York cool. In 1974 Ohara and Moriyama were included in the groundbreaking MOMA exhibition “New Japanese Photography”. Japanese photographers were enamored of the West, but not many actually emigrated, language and customs being a huge barrier. Ohara persisted in the US, with his work reflecting a Western conceptual influence, while adhering to strict Japanese/Buddhist forms and philosophy. Ohara’s recent retrospective “Extended Portrait Studies” opened at Museum Folkwang, Germany in 2006, and traveled through Germany and the United States.
The economic deflation of the late 1980s took Japan on an equally ground-breaking cultural detour. Previous principles became fragmented and ponderous. Faced with the hard task of scrambling to survive, the future was deferred. The graceful life of tea ceremony, flower arranging, Moon viewing, deliberate, proscribed living replaced by a fast-paced, ego driven, mechanized alienation. Women, formerly second-class citizens emerged as a cultural force, expressing a fragile, angry, societal critique; sometimes bizarre, sexual and masochistic, other times elegant, regulated, and oblique.
The photographs of Mikiko Hara are part of the Women’s Narrative genre. Her work in the Viewing Room expresses an instant-response to life, contrary to the deliberate thoughtfulness of the past. Everyday moments glimpsed on a train, at the beach, or in the garden – haphazardly captured with colorful detail. Sensuality exists, however subtle.
Shibui will be on exhibit at the Stephen Cohen Gallery through June 20, 2009. Gallery hours are Tuesday to Saturday from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., and by appointment.
