Seeing Through Shadows

Artistic works that resist the hegemony of market control may travel freely in rhizome-like patterns of distribution, simultaneously existing at multiple points of time and space. Despite the institutional legitimization of photography as an art form in the 1980s, the photographers Araki Nobuyoshi, Moriyama Daido, and Suda Issei continued to disseminate images through diverse channels, including magazines, collectible monographs, art exhibitions, and other forms of media. Over the past half century, their expansive oeuvre has left traces in disparate and often contradictory contexts, thereby positioning their artistic practices in a broad cultural landscape. 

Over the past two years, Moriyama’s commercial endorsement of Fujifilm and Araki’s Polaroid session with Lady Gaga have propelled heavy circulation of their works in Asian social-media outlets and in bestselling artist monographs. By contrast, Seeing Through Shadows is a showcase of thirty A3-size gelatin prints from the artists’ most celebrated series, including Araki’s Painting Flowers (2004) and Laments (2007), Moriyama’s Stray Dog (19701), Shinjuku (1980), and Japan, A Photo Theatre (1967), and Suda’s Fushi Kadden (1978) and Ningen no Kioku (1976). Presented as freshly printed pictures, these old images of post-WWII Japan are awkwardly resuscitated as new material goods, uniformly framed and evenly hung in the three-part gallery. The white-cube space isolates these photographs in a self-contained, timeless context governed by the capitalist mechanics of indexing objects into a homogenous plane of economic order. This static display of sales inventory starkly contrasts those unframed, full-bleed pages in the artists’ monographs that communicate visceral, uncensored artistic visions. Such dynamic juxtaposition demands a re-examination of the white cube’s presumed superiority over printed media in the conventional hierarchy of exhibition formats.

Moriyama Daido. (from left to right) Tights in Shimotakaido, 1987; gelatin print; 21 x 15.3 in. Kuchibiru, 2001; gelatin print, 21 x 15.3 in. Motorcycle, Shinjuku, 1990; gelatin print; 15.3 x 21 in. Installation view, Seeing Through Shadows, 2013, Gallery 100, Taipei, Taiwan. Courtesy of Gallery 100, Taipei.

Among the many American values that affected Japan during and after World War II, photography galleries and museums were imported as symbols of modernization. Being exposed to new ways of exhibiting photography, Araki, Moriyama, and Suda experimented with the terrains of art, photography, fashion, and other distributive media. The promiscuity of their practices heroically subverts the institutional authorities of cultural meaning; however, the artists themselves denounce their role in any utopian mission. Araki positions his practice in the tradition of shi-shashin, or personal photography, when he states, “ I don’t have the kind of will a revolutionary needs…even if the country demolishes tomorrow, I would only want to save my loved ones” (author’s translation).¹

Seeing Through Shadows is on view at Gallery 100, in Taipei, Taiwan, through April 21, 2013. 

Sheryl Cheung is a writer, musician, and artist living in Taipei, Taiwan. From 2008 to 2011 she participated in the curatorial project entitled Long March Project: Ho Chi Minh Trail in Beijing. Cheung is a finalist for the ACAC Writing Fellowship.

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NOTES:

1. Araki Nobuyoshi, Tencai Araki Shashin no Houhou, trans. Ke Yuanwen (Taipei: Common Master Press, 2010).