Mika Ninagawa: Liquid Dreams
Die feuchten Träume der japanische Startfotografin, höchst artifizielle Farborgien und kein bisschen anstößig. Bonbonbunte Unterwassaufnahmen verschmelzen mit Pop.

Michael Krajewski
Jahres-Charts: Das war 2009.
Stadt Revue, 01-10, 2010, p. 67

Priska Pasquer
Ferdinand Brueggemann

The top ten list was compiled by Gerry Badger, who co-authored the two volumes of “The Photobook: A History” with Martin Parr. In the first volume of the photobook anthology Gerry Badger wrote about “Utatane”:

Just when it seems that everything has been photographed, in every possible way, along comes a photographer, whose work is so original that the medium is renewed. Such a photographer is Rinko Kawauchi, who makes simple, lyrical pictures, so fresh and unusual that they are difficult to describe or classify.

Her images documentary everyday things, yet could not be described as documentary. They are generally light in tone, yet somehow dark in mood. They are almost hallucinatory, yet seem to capture something fundamental about the psychological mood of modern life.

If Kawauchi in conjuring up a dreamlike state, she is also creating a powerful metaphor for life in the contemporary metropolis, which, at least economically, is comfortable for most people, on the surface. The dream evoked in Uatatane is not nightmarish. Nothing much untoward happens, yet there is enough off-kilter to awaken us from our nap feeling vaguely confused, depressed and anxious.
[Quotes: Gerry Badger: The Photobook: A History. Vol. 1]

PS: Our partner Antoine de Vilmorin had exhibited the series “Utatane” in Paris in April 2008.

LICHTBILDER UND LEIDENSCHAFT

Fotografie gilt auf dem Kunstmarkt immer noch als zweitklassiges Medium – trotz der Erfolge von Demand, Gursky und Co. Doch einige Experten arbeiten leidenschaftlich daran, dieses Image zu verändern. Zu Besuch bei Deutschlands wichtigsten Fotogaleristen.
// Stefan Koldehoff

Die Spezialistin: Priska Pasquer, Köln
Am Anfang stand eigentlich nur der Wunsch, Menschen zu beraten, die sich ernsthaft für Fotografie interessieren: ihnen Sammlungskonzepte vorzuschlagen, Betrachtern die Möglichkeit eröffnen, auch Besitzer zu werden. Kunstgeschichte hatte die Kölner Galeristin Priska Pasquer ursprünglich studiert und währenddessen in der Galerie von Rudolf Kicken gearbeitet.

In der dritten Etage einer alten Villa im Kölner Nordwesten machte sie sich 1996 schließlich selbständig – und überraschte gleich mit einem eigenständigen Profil: Die Galerie Pasquer steht für Fotokünstler, die eine ungewöhnliche Sicht auf die Welt und höchstes ästhetisches Niveau kennzeichnen. Dass der russische Maler, Architekt und Typograf El Lissitzky auch ein kleines fotografisches Oeuvre hinterließ, wurde in Deutschland bekannt, seit Pasquer seinen Nachlass vertrat. Neben der russischen wandte sie sich schnell auch der japanischen Fotografie zu, für die in der Galerie heute Pasquers Kollege Ferdinand Brüggemann verantwortlich zeichnet. Ausstellungen von in Deutschland bereits bekannteren Fotografen wie Daido Moriyama oder Asako Narahashi wechseln ab mit denen jüngerer Kollegen wie Ikko Narahara oder des 79-jährigen Shomei Tomatsu.
[Quote: Art Magazin]

The full article can be read online at art-magazin.de.

Till death do us sculpt: Russian to render human bodies into art materials
Fancy a long-lasting keepsake of your loved one? What better than a statue made from the resin of their mortal remains?
It gives a grim new meaning to the term body art. A leading contemporary Russian artist says he has perfected a technique to boil human corpses into crude oil from which he will create permanent sculptures, and he has already signed up willing volunteers. [...]
The Independent

Andrei Molodkin: black gold, blood red
Molodkin’s obsession with oil began when he ate it on bread as a recreational drug. Now he wants to make it from human corpses [...]
For Molodkin, oil, ink and blood are all the same. Ink is the blood of a pen. Oil is the blood of Russia. Blood will one day be oil, which may be made into ink. Boiling down corpses into oil, he reckons, is just speeding up the process. “People say I should not show,” he says apologetically, calling up his custom-made furnace thing on his computer. “They say it is like a meat-shop. But it is a simple idea. From all organic things you can make vodka or spirit. It is just a measure of time and some chemical things.” In the pictures there is a small amount of oil under a huge tank. Molodkin says that you should get 2.5 litres from a person, but this was his trial run, and there was an accident – the machine was opened too early and the transformation was not complete. “Still liquid,” he adds, reassuringly. Who was inside? “Just the dogs and cats I find on the road. I wanted to ask the zoo, for maybe they had an elephant.” So far, he has a whole range of volunteers, from a French porn star to a BBC journalist. He’s planning to write to lots of international figures and, when he dies, plans to be made into oil himself. “Maybe I can be enough energy to drive a short way in a Porsche,” he laughs. “Or 50km in a Japanese car. Or an economical light.” [...]
The Times

Andrei Molodkin wants your body
Andrei Molodkin is telling me about his sensational plan to boil down human bodies into oil for his sculptures. He imagines they will make a “yellowish sweet crude”. Not only this, in June he represents Russia at the Venice Biennale with a sculpture filled with human blood which he intends to buy on the black market. He also thinks it would be “really cool” to make a sculpture from the remains of a suicide bomber. And I arrived at our meeting thinking that art no longer had the power to shock. [...]
Evening Standard

The man with oil in his veins
It is easy, in an age of hyper-commercialism and polished public relations, to believe that art has lost its bohemian edge completely. How many of today’s artists are inspired, not by an innermost compulsion to express themselves, but by the common desire, shared by more prosaic professions, to make a decent living? Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst are consummate PR men, as deft in the arts of marketing as in those of pure creation, and almost unfeasibly rich. But every so often, the spirit of the artist as radical outsider can still make itself felt. I travelled to Paris last week to visit the studio of Andrei Molodkin, a 43-year-old Russian who is shortly to feature in an exhibition in a new London gallery, Orel Art, and who will represent his country in the forthcoming Venice Biennale. [...]
Financial Times

Mika Ninagawa: Earthly Flowers, Heavenly Colors
at the Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery from November 1 to December 28.

Mika Ninagawa is one of the most popular photographers in Japan. She is also well-known as the director of the movie Sakuran, 2007, which is based on a comic by Moyoko Anno. As a photographer, she has shown her gorgeous works at many solo and group exhibitions in Japan and abroad. Her photographic style is instantly identifiable by the versatility that she draws from various fields. She specializes in portrait, flower, goldfish and landscape photography characterized by a vivid sense of colour and composition. This is the first comprehensive retrospective show of Ninagawa’s work, presenting well-known works from the late 1990s to 2000s, and her most recent works as well.
[Quote: Pressrelease Exhibition]

Higashikawa is a small town in Hokkaido, located at the north end of Japan.
The photo festival has been organized for over twenty years since 1985 and it is an important festival for Japanese contemporary photography. The following photographers have been awarded with the Domestic Photographery Prize until now:

HIGASHIKAWA DOMESTIC PHOTOGRAPHER PRIZE
The 1st / 1985     SUDA Issei / TAHARA Keiichi
The 2nd / 1986    SHINOYAMA Kishin
The 3rd / 1987     NARAHARA Ikko
The 4th / 1988     UEDA Shoji
The 5th / 1989     WATABE Yukichi
The 6th / 1990     MURAI Osamu
The 7th / 1991     ARAKI Nobuyoshi
The 8th / 1992     HASHIGUCHI George
The 9th / 1993     TAKANASHI Yutaka
The 10th / 1994    ARAMASA Taku
The 11th / 1995    SUGIMOTO Hiroshi
The 12th / 1996    KAWADA Kikuji
The 13th / 1997    NOMACHI Kazuyoshi
The 14th / 1998    SUGA Hiroshi
The 15th / 1999    ISHIUCHI Miyako
The 16th / 2000    HATAKEYAMA Naoya
The 17th / 2001    HOSOE Eikoh
The 18th / 2002    MORIMURA Yasumasa
The 19th / 2003    SAITO Ryoichi
The 20th / 2004    NAKAGAWA Yukio
The 21st / 2005    KOYAMA Hotaro
The 22nd / 2006   SUZUKI Risaku
The 23rd / 2007    SUGIUWA Kunie
The 24th / 2008    NARAHASHI Asako

By the way, works by the winner of the 1st Higashikawa Domestic Photographer Prize, Issei Suda, were part of our summer exhibition Review / Preview – Japanese Photographs which just ended. And we are currently preparing the first solo exhibition since two decades of Suda Issei in the West for this autumn.

Japanese photographer Rinko Kawauchi records the ephemeral scenes that pass by each day barely noticed, searching for the sublime in the banal. The 40 photographs here came from her 2001 series “Utatane”, which means “catnap” and refers to a state of half sleep. The idea of letting go of conscious thought and giving oneself over to intimate moments tied together these breathtaking and occasionally melancholy still lifes, landscapes and portraits.

Subjects include wilting sunflowers, a dead wasp upside down on a windowsill, eggs sunny-side up, a laughing woman, a bit of frayed rope, and an expanse of cloud-filled sky worthy of a Constable painting. Kawauchi uses only natural light to achieve adiant, translucent colors and often takes prictures in close-up or from curious, oblique perspectives to produce striking compositions. They focus the viewer’s gaze with precision but never feel clinical. Even the unframed presentation was calculated to offer the greatest immediacy.

The artist has said that she takes photographs without forethought, when the mood or inspiratioin strikes, and the images are too scattered to suggest a narrative. Yet each seems loaded with meaning, like a line of poetry. These delicate, luminous fragments encourage us to take the time to see. They are filled with humanity but never slip into sweetness.

Laurie Hurwitz

1. ARTnews, summer 2008, no. 7, p. 180

Since her debut, Rinko Kawauchi has surely established her career both in Japan and overseas. Her works captures ephemeral beauty in everyday life, from life to death, and its circulation, and it has been stimulating our, not only our sight, but also all the other senses.
“Cui Cui”- warble of sparrows in French- is a series of her family’s stories in 13 years Rinko Kawauchi had photographed from 1992 to 2005. Including the newly taken works after 2005, Rinko Kawauchi solo exhibition “Cui Cui” at The Vangi Sculpture Garden Museum will show this series of the artist for the first time at a Museum in Japan.
[Quote: Vangi Sculpture Garden Museum]

This is Rinko Kawauchi’s first solo exhibition in a Japanese museum and the first time that her series “Cui Cui”, published in 2005, is exhibited in a solo show.

The Vangi Sculpture Garden Museum is located 100 km south of Tokyo in Mishima City/ Shizuoka Prefecture. It is part of a multi-cultural facility of art and nature including the Bernard Buffet Museum and the Literary Museum for Yasushi Inoue.