Mujô-kan — Da-End Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: November 6 → December 21, 2013

Within the framework of its series of exhibitions dedicated to Japanese photography, Galerie Da-End presents Mujô-Kan, a display based this year on the notion of impermanence. Gathering seven contemporary artists, Mujô-kan revisits both philosophically and plastically the theme of the human body.

In the Buddhist thought, the notion of impermanence (Mujô-Kan in Japanese) involves an acute consciousness of the ephemerality of things. A memento mori without fatality and more bound to reality and instant. First witnesses of the passage of time, the human face and body have always constituted one of the photographer’s favorite topics. The artists of the Mujô-Kan exhibition, Tomohide Ikeya, Tomoko Kikuchi, Ken Kitano, Daïdo Moriyama, Satoki Nagata, Sakiko Nomura and Satoshi Saïkusa share a common interest in the human body, that they enhance or deconsecrate, carefully examine or dematerialize.

Tomohide Ikeya, in his Breath series, submerses the body in an aquatic environment that fascinates him. The liquid mass that weighs on the model seems both enveloping, protective but also asphyxiating and predatory. In the glimpse of a stopped motion, the photographer catches the ambiguous relationship of man with that vital element, oscillating between harmony and danger.

Satoki Nagata, as for him, deals with the disappearance of matter. As a result of long photographic exposure, which is his trademark, the bodies he catches lose their substance and reveal the fragility of human life. Nagata’s night shots don’t picture individuals per se but more wandering shadows, lost in the city.

With the series Portrait Of Our Face, Ken Kitano is trying to reach the limits of the individuality of the « Self ». To do so, he superimposes dozens of portraits of anonymous persons that belong to the same social class.

Sakiko Nomura confronts us to the existential fragility by propelling us into the intimacy of strangers that she physically and emotionally strips down. Within the shared closeness of the bedroom, the artist transposes her model’s deepest fears, their lone melancholy or their intense need of the other.

Daïdo Moriyama, for his part, throws a crude and uncompromising look at the body, that he immortalizes naked and on the spot. His icy erotic photographs call in a cautious staging, with a blurred and immediate rendering.

With the rigor of the practitioner, Satoshi Saïkusa auscultates his subjects and reveals his obsession with the passing of time. In the Nippon Konchuki series, he slices and pins up the body of young women as if they were caught butterflies preserved in entomological boxes.

Tomoko Kikuchi has been documenting for several years the daily life of transvestites living in China. The bodies she presents are undergoing changes, whether modified temporarily by the help of makeup or more permanently by plastic surgery. By gaining the confidence of her models through time, the photographer succeeds in going over the basic notions of genre and sexuality. Eventually, she puts in light the marginal lives of young souls craving for love and recognition.