Japanese Photography at the ICP
“I’ve always wanted to be different since I was a kid, and I’ve always been knocked around for it” (eight years later) (2002) by Hiroh Kikai
N.Y. Times By the International Center of Photography’s own standards, “Heavy Light: Recent Photography and Video From Japan” feels a bit phoned in.
But with 13 artists, most of them in their 30s or 40s, it is the first large survey of Japanese photography in this country in decades. It contains some names that are new and worth knowing and others that are familiar and worth remembering. And when all else fails, it provides, at times inadvertently, some valuable glimpses of Japanese life and culture today, including a tendency to prolong adolescence.
“Sword of Rancor” (1969) by Yukio Nakagawa
One of its revelations is how much the artistic tradition of extreme artifice, visible in everything from gold-leaf folding screens and lacquer ware to bonsai gardening and ikebana, continues to course through Japanese art, clashing or mingling with reality.
“Ageha 24 Aoko 23″ (2006)
On the down side, the show has commitment and space problems. Masajuki Yoshinaga’s extraordinary photographs of the Goth-Lolita sub-culture are visible only one image at a time, on a large digital screen. This reduces their impact and their contribution to the visual energy of the show.
“Blast #2611” (1996)
“Heavy Light” divides between those photographers who include people in their images and those who don’t. One of the don’ts, Naoya Hatakeyama, quietly gives the show its center of gravity, with large color images that push fairly rugged documentary subjects toward artifice. A photograph of a lime quarry blast shows rock fragments hurtling outward in a nearly perfect orb, and images of Tokyo buildings taken from water level in a concrete-walled river qualify as accidental Cubism.
”River Series No. 6” (1993) by Naoya Hatakeyama
A wall covered with 96 views of Tokyo taken from the tops of high rises over 16 years shows a world carpeted with mostly gray buildings. Changing light seems to be the subject of the images, which sometimes are taken from the same location. But then you realize that the images have been taken years apart and that they also records the city’s changing architecture.
”Red box_Shinjyuku” (2006)
In colorful but deserted images of an entertainment district near Osaka, Naoki Kajitani shows the Japanese love of artifice in society’s tawdrier sectors in neon signs advertising drink or exotic dancers; a display of pornographic magazines or a shot of a lone but red kiosk plastered with posters.
“Destiny” (1988)
As a master of ikebana, Yukio Nakagawa, who was born in 1918, has a long experience with the tension between natural and artificial and backed into photography while using it to document his work. His arrangements are Surreal temporary sculpture: a long, curved iris leaf filled with rose petals lies like a curved knife blade dipped in blood. A glazed ceramic stiletto houses a “fingered citron,” a fruit that looks more like a squid than a lemon.
The most impressive artists who engage the human form are poles apart. Hiroh Kikai, born in 1945, is a kind of August Sander without a studio. “A tattoo artist and his son,” records a young man with peroxided hair, holding a child with a vertiginous mohawk who resembles a young witch. His images are full of soul and respect. They remind you that artifice understated is style, which seems to come naturally to the Japanese.
Born in 1977, Tomoko Sawada is widely known for photo-booth and yearbook pictures of girls in which, using computers and variations in hair, make-up and expression, she plays each and every character. In Ms. Sawada’s “School Days” series, groups of young girls in their school uniforms are lined up in neat rows. Subtle feats of acting that quietly satirize Japan’s homogeneity andemhasis on conformity, these images are initially innocuous. As their single subject emerges from the crowd, they become quite demonic. They have a focus, reserve and ambition that is too often missing from this exhibition.
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