Street Level Japan

I enjoyed Mu Ge’s January exhibit at Zen Foto Gallery, “Go Home.” Now in March, Zen Foto is showing “Still Lake” by Liu Ke (劉珂), another photographer from Chongqing who also takes 6×6 photos by its rivers. (The two photographers are friends in real life.) Although their work is naturally close, the differences between them go beyond the fact that Mu Ge uses black and white and Liu Ke uses color.

Most of Liu Ke’s photos can be placed into one of three groups: portraits, conditions (i.e. of Chongqing) and abstractions. Mu Ge’s work consists mostly of these first two categories, and I think that right now, his portraits are stronger than Liu Ke’s. As for “conditions,” this is where the two are closest—each show human activity at the scene of Chongqing’s rivers.

But the abstractions are where Liu Ke breaks from Mu Ge: at times, he forces a strong composition on his material. The image of a lone bus in an otherwise empty scene is compelling, and it wouldn’t have any place in Mu Ge’s world.

The bus is actually one of the strongest motifs running through Liu Ke’s work, and it becomes another backdrop against which to observe people. The photos of people sitting on buses are some of the best photos in Liu Ke’s portfolio. They’re often craning their necks out the window, looking towards something that’s hidden from the viewer.

There can be a lot of ambiguity with Liu Ke. Why is this shopkeeper covering his face? And what’s happening on TV?

I don’t think it’s coincidental that this photo was taken away from the river. It seems as though if you’re in Chongqing and take a photo of something by the river, there’s a good chance that an unexpected element—power lines, a boat, a half destroyed building—will creep into the frame, just due to the loose distribution of human material in this area.

Liu Ke’s work is actually weaker when it asks this material to carry the weight of his photos; the ineffective image of a woman walking on a dam comes to mind here. By contrast, the shot of fireworks through a window creates a very strong impression. As Liu Ke looks away from the river, he develops a personal and thoughtful style which is certainly worth following. I recommend looking at his prints and portfolios, which will be up until March 24 at Zen Foto.

Conscientious wrote an internet blog post about Ishiuchi Miyako’s Hiroshima and had the chutzpah to call it a “review.” Let’s think about whether this is deserved. Here’s the first sentence of the post:

“The 20th Century was filled to the brim with atrocities, war, and genocide.”

O rly? It would make just as much sense to write a sentence beginning with “Since time immemorial,” or “Throughout history.” Either way, this is a cliche. First sentence of second paragraph:

“Photographers have a long tradition of trying to deal with suffering, to try to convey what it might have meant for those who perished.”

Again, this doesn’t really mean anything, and it could be equally true of painting or sculpture or literature. We still haven’t heard about the work at all, but that’s coming in the next paragraph:

“Miyako Ishiuchi’s Hiroshima, which I first heard about through Marc and which I just found in a Japanese book shop, is another example. Hiroshima shows clothing and personal items worn by victims of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima. There are about 19,000 such items in the collection of the city’s Peace Memorial Museum, and the book presents a tiny fraction of these. At the very end of the book, there is a list of the presented items, along with the names of the victims (where they are known).”

So now we know what’s in the book. And the photos themselves, pray tell? Maybe the next and final paragraph will tell us:

“It is left to the viewer to deal with the images, there is no further text (apart from a short statement by the photographer), no explanations, no descriptions. Where words must fail, can images tell us something? I think they can, once we realize that what they might tell us is what we are able to tell ourselves.”

Oh. Actually, as you now understand, it’s left for someone other than the writer to “deal” with the images.

So, where’s the beef here? Why is there no engagement with the work? What makes these muddled thoughts a “review”? At some minimal level, shouldn’t a review communicate the writer’s impressions of the thing they are claiming to tell us about? “Once we realize that what they might tell us is what we are able to tell ourselves”—what does this even mean? Can anyone parse that sentence? (In all fairness it could just contain a typo)

Beyond this one review, why do so many people continually reaffirm the authority of this writing? Online, any blogger can say “this is a review” (”I am a curator“), and the responsibility of deciding whether to take this statement at face value falls on the audience. How will this audience lose its sheep-like qualities, when acting in bad faith—saying nothing means saying “yes”—is so much easier?

This post was a missed opportunity, because it’s worth saying something (anything!) about Ishiuchi’s photographs. She manages the difficult task of conveying the scale of the atomic bomb’s effect without beating the viewer over the head. The entire book is photographs of clothing and mundane objects recovered from Hiroshima (yo this is a link to a site where you can see a number of these images), and I have to admit that when it was described to me verbally I imagined that the work might have been cold, if not even boring. But this isn’t the case at all.

Ishiuchi’s presentation of these objects makes a quiet but clear statement about the magnitude of the atomic bomb. Each thing is recognizable, but has some visible sign of destruction. Ishiuchi photographed these objects against a plain background, and by removing any kind of identifying context, the viewer has to imagine how their particular kind of damage came about. In some cases, it’s possible to make out obvious burn marks, but others are less clear: the fabric of one garment has an eerie lightness to it which certainly did not come from overuse. A schoolgirl’s uniform with alien-looking holes ripped clear through it doesn’t need an explanation.

It’s not easy viewing, but Hiroshima is a carefully considered portrait of August 6 which is well worth seeking out.

NB: Marc Feustel’s post about photographic responses to Hiroshima is a good read for more on this subject. Also, August 6 falls around Japan’s obon week, a festival to remember the dead. I rarely have extended conversations about World War II here in Japan, but I was struck by how often the topic came up during that time, and I saw Hiroshima in that context.

It’s one thing to look at a book (or JPG, for that matter) but often the clarity of a print can offer a different sensation. On the back of her impressive book “half awake and half asleep in the water,” I went to Narahashi Asako’s career-spanning exhibit at the Tokyo Art Museum in the hope of seeing something different from her prints. The show did make good on that expectation, but unfortunately not for the better.

“Coming Closer and Getting Farther Away 2009/1989“ (up until December 27) was a real disappointment, largely because the prints were so poor in quality. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the catalog for the show, even the flyer for the show, looked better than these prints, which were large-sized inkjets with gigantic white borders. The colors were completely flat, as if there was a pale blue color cast—so frustrating when it’s obvious that Narahashi can make good prints!

Beyond their quality, all of the photos in this show were hung unframed, pasted to the wall by the top two corners. The bottom two corners hung free, and the paper was bent or creased in many places, as if each photo had been, as they say, blowing in the wind. Most of the prints were pasted up right next to each other, which made for an ugly sight: a solid line of loose paper flying off the wall, large borders cluttering the field of vision, and glare bouncing off the creases.

This style of hanging prints could have worked in a different building, but the Tokyo Art Museum is designed by Tadao Ando, which means that (for better or worse) it resembles an industrial refrigerator made out of concrete. In such an austere setting it didn’t seem fitting to hang the work as if haphazardly. I could have missed Narahashi’s concept entirely, but it was another off-kilter element which prevented the show from ever really getting off the ground.

There is a talk by Kenya Hara, art director of MUJI, in which he explains why he thinks that Japanese culture (!) should be thought of as valuing “emptiness,” rather than “simplicity.” This distinction can be traced all the way back to the construction of a Shinto shrine, which at its center is always an empty space enclosed by four pillars, bound at the top with straw. The building around this space is not all that important. The empty space is more valuable, because it offers the possibility of being filled.

To cite Hara’s more modern example, we can look at the design of knives from America and Japan. The handle of an American knife might have a molded grip, which means it can be held in only one way. That’s simple. A Japanese knife, though, will have a cylindrical handle, which can accommodate whatever style the cook may wish to use. Hara calls this knife empty.

The photographs in Yamashita Tsuneo’s “Another time on the Ryuku Islands” made me think of that talk. I wanted to call his photographs “simple,” but maybe I should say that they’re empty. What does this mean? The photos are a vehicle for transmitting the experience of being on the islands. Like the building around a shrine, they’re not actually that important. You might forget that you are looking at photographs.

Walking around the exhibit, I felt connected to this place in Okinawa. It’s strange to say, but a close up photograph of a large, still-wet squid lying on a wooden table gave me the impression of what the air on the Ryuku islands would feel like.

I can’t guarantee that you will have a similar experience, but perhaps if you go to the gallery without thinking very much, you’ll feel the same way.

All of these photos are from a different series, “Daily.” They are also all © Yamashita Tsuneo