We are open today.(10:00-18:00)

CHEN Zhe, Bees #065-01, from the series “Bees” (2010) © Chen Zhe
2F

I know something about love, asian contemporary photography

Oct. 2Nov. 25, 2018

  • Oct. 2Nov. 25, 2018
  • Closed :Monday (if Monday is a national holiday or a substitute holiday, it is the next day)
  • Admission:Adults ¥800/College Students ¥700/High School and Junior High School Students, Over 65 ¥600

Asia is undergoing a period of spectacular transformation and development. In the fields of both contemporary photography and art interest in Asia continues to grow. This exhibition will focus on the current state of the family, sexuality and gender to introduce the changing face of contemporary Asia through the work of women artists representing China, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, ethnic Koreans raised in Japan and Japan. They may vary in nationality, age, and artistic career, but are all highly regarded as Asian contemporary artists and through their sense of values they share the ever-changing 'now' of Asia. Each of them confronts their reality and the ‘now’ directly, to keep moving forward. In the depths of their gaze, we are able to see that they 'know something about love.'

Participating Artists:
KIM Insook (Japan, 1978– )
Born in Osaka, 1978, a third generation Zainichi Korean(residing in Japan). After graduating in photography from the Visual Arts College Osaka, she traveled to Korea where she studied painting, photography and images at the Graduate School of Arts of Hansung University, receiving her M.A. in 2005. She currently lives and works in Seoul. She has produced several series of works, such as sweet hours’ (2001– ), which focuses on life in the Osaka Korean High School, or SAIESEO: between two Koreas and Japan (2008– ) that presents a family portrait of life as an ethnic Korean in Japan, in which she highlights the problems of identity, community, race and family that arise when living in the gap between different cultures. She has been invited to participate in numerous art festivals and group exhibitions in Japan and abroad, including, Go-Betweens: The World Seen through Children (Mori Art Museum, 2014–2015), Light 2016 (Gwangju Museum of Art, Korea, 2016–2017), Family Report (Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, Korea, 2017), #Selfie - The people who take picture by themselves (SAVINA Museum of Contemporary art, Korea, 2017), etc.


KIM Insook, Son and I from the series “SAIESEO: between two Koreas and Japan” 2008 © Kim Insook

KIM Oksun (Korea, 1967– )
Born in Seoul 1967. Graduated with an M.F.A. from the Department of Industrial Design (Photography), Hongik University, Seoul, Korea in 1996. She became recognized as one of Korea's leading photographers with her series, Happy Together (2000–2004) that features interracial couples. She began to focus on works that look at identity and inter-cultural conflict with Hamel's Boat (2008), continuing this theme with No Direction Home (2009–2011), which consists of portraits of the foreigners who live on Jeju Island, and The Shining Things (2011) that features various plants that have been introduced into Jeju. In 2017 she received the 8th Ilwoo Photo Award, Seoul, Korea (Korean Airlines) and in 2016 she won the 15th Dong Gang Photography Award at the Dong Gang International Photo Festival, Yeongwol, Korea. Her solo exhibitions include Museum of Innocence (Goeun Museum of Photography, Pusan, 2016), The Shining Things (The Museum of Photography, Seoul, 2014), No Direction Home (The Museum of Photography, Seoul, 2011) and many more. She has also been invited to participate in numerous art festivals and group exhibitions, including: 1st Jeju Biennale (Jeju Museum of Art, Jeju, 2017), Public to Private: Photography in Korean Art since 1989, (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, 2016), Chaotic Harmony (Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, USA, 2010), and many others. She currently lives on Jeju Island.


KIM Oksun, Hiroyo and Michael 2, from the series Happy Together 2004 ©Oksun KIM

HOU Lulu Shur-Tzy (Taiwan, 1962– )
Born in Chiayi, Taiwan in 1962. Graduated from the Department of Philosophy at National Taiwan University in 1985. Received a Master of Fine Art degree from the Rochester Institute of Technology, U.S.A. in 1992. From 2004 to the present, she has worked as an assistant professor in the Creative Design/Architecture department of the National University of Kaohsiung. From the beginning of her career, she has explored the themes of gender, identity, social class and ethnicity, through such works as Take a picture, it lasts longer (1996), in which she used her own body as a subject to satirize the way of women are looked upon and women’s expected roles, and Labors and Labels (1997), that looks at women working in the spinning mills of Taiwan, etc. In particular, her Border-crossing/Cultural Identities—Song of Asian Foreign Brides in Taiwan (2005, 2008, 2009), which she started in 2004, uses the theme of women from Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Indonesia who come to Taiwan as mail-order brides. Consisting of photographs and text, this three-part series was shown in a solo exhibition in the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts in 2010 and has become recognized as her representative work. Another series in which she employs her unique ‘double-gaze’ technique of juxtaposing two identical photographs, one being digitally processed and superimposed with the text written by the subject, is A Trilogy on Kaohsiung Military Dependents’ Villages, that she showed to wide acclaim at the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts in 2017. Her activities are not limited to Taiwan and she has also been invited to participate exhibitions in America, Europe, Japan, Hong Kong, etc.


HOU Lulu Shur-Tzy, Shabg Jiu-ju&Lu Duo 01, From the series A Trilogy on Kaohsiung Military Dependents’ Villeges―EpisodeⅠ:Here is where we meet(Lizfi New Village),2012 ©Lulu Shur-Tzy Hou

CHEN Zhe (China, 1989– )
Born in Beijing in 1989. Graduated in photography from the ArtCenter College of Design, Los Angeles in 2011. Her series of work, The Bearable, which deals with the subject of self-harm, received the Three Shadows Photography Art Centre Award (2011), the Lianzhou Festival New Photography Award(2011) and the Xitek New Talent Award (2015), while the photobook version of Bees & The Bearable won the Best Photobook Award at the Fotobook Festival Kassel in 2016, making her currently one of the most talked about women artists in China today. She is currently working on a series entitled Towards Evening: Six Chapters in which she uses diaries and letters as her material to explore the theme of words and images.


CHEN Zhe, Bees #065-01, from the series “Bees” 2010 © Chen Zhe

Geraldine KANG (Singapore, 1988– )
Born in Singapore, 1988. Having graduated from the School of Art, Design and Media, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore in 2011, she is currently studying at the Parsons School of Design, New York. She first received attention for a series of family portraits, entitled in the raw (2010-2011) that she produced as a project while she was still in university, and after graduation was invited to participate in group exhibitions in Singapore, Germany, Netherlands, New York, etc., achieving recognition as a young artist while continuing her energetic activities. Her main works include, Of two bedrooms (2010-2015) that featured her relationship with her grandmother and her grandmother’s death; As quietly as rhythms go (2014), which consists of nighttime photographs of a construction site by the Sungei Serangoon River; Left to Right (2016), which is a photobook created in collaboration with fifty-three artists and curators on the theme of the image and How do you sleep at night? (2017– ), which looks at Singapore’s garbage collectors and immigrant laborers.


Geraldine KANG, 08:33 (2010), from the series “In the raw”, 2010 – 2011 © Geraldine Kang

SUDO Ayano (Japan, 1986– )
Born in Osaka, 1986. Completed a master’s degree course at Kyoto City University of Arts graduate school in 2011. While still in university, she studied overseas at École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris. In 2009, she received the Mayor’s Award for a work that she produced at Kyoto City University of Arts. In 2011 she received a Special Jurists' Honorable Mention Award from MORIMURA Yasumasa at the MiO Photo Award. In 2014 her work Gespenster was awarded the Grand Prize at the Canon New Cosmos of Photography Exhibition. Among her main works are Metamorphose (2011– ), which features photographs of her and her friends transformed into ideal forms, regardless of sex; Gespenster (2013–14), that is a series of self-portraits in which she adopts the likeness of actual missing girls; Autoscopy (2015), which uses as its motif the phenomenon in which a person visualizes other people as resembling themselves, etc. After holding her first solo exhibition at the 1839 Contemporary Gallery (Taiwan, 2011), she has participated in numerous exhibitions and art fairs both in Japan and abroad. Among the major exhibitions she has taken part in was New Planet Photo City - William Klein and Photographers Living in the 22nd Century (21_21 Design Sight, Tokyo, 2018) and many others.


SUDO Ayano, from the series Gespenster 2013 ©Ayano Sudo / Courtesy of MEM, Tokyo

□Organized by Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Tokyo Metropolitan Foundation for History and Culture, The Tokyo Shimbun
□Sponsored by the Corporate Membership of Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Toppan Printing Co., Ltd., Shiseido Company, Limited

Events

Relay Talk
Oct. 4 (Thu) 18:00~20:00 HOU Lulu Shur-Tzy × KIM Oksun (in Japanese)
Oct. 5 (Fri) 18:00~20:00 CHEN Zhe × Geraldine KANG
Nov. 17 (Sat) 15:30~17:00 KIM Insook × SUDO Ayano (in Japanese)
Venue: Tokyo Photographic Art Museum 1F. Studio
Seating Capacity: 50. (Entrance will be in order of numbered tickets issued upon arrival, all seats unreserved).
Entrance Fee: Free with numbered ticket.
* Numbered tickets will be issued at the information desk on the 1st floor from 10:00 in the morning of the same day.
Discussion (in Japanese)
Oct. 13 (Sat) 15:30~17:00
Guest: KOKATSU Reiko (modern/contemporary art historian, art critic) and KASAHARA Michiko, (Vice Director, Bridgestone Museum of Art, previously Chief Curator, Tokyo Photographic Art Museum)
Venue: Tokyo Photographic Art Museum 1F. Studio
Seating Capacity: 50. (Entrance will be in order of numbered tickets issued upon arrival, all seats unreserved).
Entrance Fee: Free with numbered ticket.
* Numbered tickets will be issued at the information desk on the 1st floor from 10:00 in the morning of the same day.
Gallery Talks by exhibition curator (in Japanese)
Oct. 12 (Fri) 14:00~
Oct. 26 (Fri) 14:00~
Nov. 9 (Fri) 14:00~
Nov. 23 (Fri) 14:00~
The curator will provide explanatory talks on the exhibits from 14:00, every 2nd and 4th Friday of the month during the course of the exhibition.
Please gather at the entrance of the 2nd floor gallery with a current exhibition ticket (date-stamped for that day)


*Changes may be made due to circumstances beyond our control