NYAB Event - Emi Anrakuji “O MAPA”

Emi Anrakuji “O MAPA”

MIYAKO YOSHINAGA art prospects

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Miyako Yoshinaga Gallery presents the fourth solo exhibition of Emi Anrakuji since 2006.

Known for her voyeuristic recording of dream-states in everyday life, Emi Anrakuji ultimately creates a compelling parallel world that is both intimate and remote.

In Anrakuji’s new series entitled O MAPA (“The Map” in Portuguese), 25 photographs, mostly black and white, feature a vulnerable and sensual female persona as the artist’s alter ego, who appears in an array of mysterious urban and rural settings. Fragmentary and obscure, the subject’s activity and/or location is purposefully left to the viewer to identify. The artist refers to these portraits simply as “actions” which are necessary to do in order to live and as essential as breathing, blinking, or sleeping. Most of the time, these visions seem confined within a liminal state while conveying a sense of motion. Anrakuji’ use of peculiarly low or high angles brings to mind the anonymous nature of surveillance photographs. The artist has recently shifted her approach from expressing restrained emotions to exploring her persona’s surrogate life and developing an eloquent narrative around it. In this regard, her current work tends to avoid displaying excessive emotional tones, allowing the viewer to read the photographs like a map with multiple perspectives. This new series, O MAPA releases a flow of emotions filtered not by logic but by intuition arising from the artist’s concocted dreams.

Emi Anrakuji (b. 1963) lives and works in Tokyo, Japan, where she studied oil painting at Musashino University of Art and Music. In the early 1980s, she was diagnosed with a cerebral tumor. During her recovery and a decade-long hiatus, she taught herself photography. Since 2001, her work has been extensively exhibited across Japan, Korea, the United Kingdom and the United States. Her work has been reviewed by many notable publications, including C-International Photo Magazine and X-funs. Nazraeli Press has published several monographs, including e-hagaki (2006), ANRAKUJI (2007) and IPY (2008).