“Just Visiting This Planet” Exhibition

Miyako Yoshinaga

This event has ended.

MIYAKO YOSHINAGA presents a winter group show entitled “Just Visiting This Planet.” The 1991 documentary film of the same title featured the legendary Japanese butoh dancer Kazuo Ôno (1906-2010) visiting Berlin, Venice, Vienna, and New York. The film captured the aging dancer up-close and personal, performing indoors and outdoors on each city’s most culturally magnetic site, while creating his own universe.

In tribute to the film’s essence – the celebration of the creativity of a free soul without physical boundaries, our group exhibition presents works by six contemporary Japanese photographers – Emi Anrakuji, Hitoshi Fugo, Mikiko Hara, Mayumi Lake, Yu Yamauchi, and Daisuke Yokota. Ranging from landscapes and portraits to still lifes, their work is sensitive to the transient nature of life while exploring its emotionally profound moments. These concepts – the perception of non-permanence (mujo) or sensitivity to ephemera (mono no aware) – are deeply rooted in Japanese culture, and the associated expression of gentle sorrow has been cultivated in Japanese art for centuries.

The highlights of the exhibition include Hunch by Mayumi Lake from her 2014 “Latent Heat” series — striking color tableaux of a barefoot woman in kimono robe hunching over a dead tree trunk; Untitled no. 421 by Daisuke Yokota from his haunting “Site/Cloud” series (2012) featuring a solarized black & white image of a female hiding in a bush; Mikiko Hara’s Untitled (2008), a soft-focus halved pomegranate, which recently became part of her new series; Hitoshi Fugo’s Flying Frying Pan 70 from his fantastical series capturing the microcosmic world of an iron pan; Emi Anrakuji’s Untitled 26, depicting a graffiti-like shadow of herself while catching sublime sunlight, from her 2018 series “Just Love.” Also, online only, we present Yu Yamauchi’s ethereal paradise in rural Mongolia, N 51°12’ 08.5”E9 8° 5 9‘4 2.6 “- #18, where humans and animals coexist in complicated ecological and political realities.

About the artists (by alphabetical order):

Emi Anrakuji
Born and raised in Tokyo, Emi Anrakuji demonstrated her prodigy in art early on in her life and studied at one of the top Japanese art schools. However, soon after graduation, an illness sidelined her career until she recovered in the early 2000s with her discovery of photography. Anrakuji won the Higashikawa Photo Award in 2006 while exhibiting her work in Tokyo, Daegu, New York, Paris, and Madrid. She has published several photobooks, including HMMT? (2005), Anrakuji (2006), e-hagaki (2006), IPY (2008), MISHO (2017), and most recently Balloon Position (2019).

Hitoshi Fugo
Tokyo-based Hitoshi Fugo discovered his own planet in his “Flying Frying Pan” series dating back to the 1970s. The four images from the series in this exhibition make a striking statement of freedom from time and place. Emerging from his own kitchen during the recent quarantine, his “Chance and Necessity” series continues to pursue the unseen — the opposite goal of most photographers. The series was featured in the New York Times T-Magazine in the article “Eight Photographers’ Pictures from Isolation” in April 2020.

Mikiko Hara
Born in Toyama, Japan, Mikiko Hara studied photography after she earned an MA in art theory and art history. Over the years, she has developed her distinctively personal color-snapshot style, holding a number of solo exhibitions in Tokyo, Osaka, and New York, and in important museum group exhibitions internationally. Her work is in the collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art among others. Hara is the winner of the 42nd Kimura Ihei Photography Award and is currently developing an idea for a new publication of her work.

Mayumi Lake
Originally from Osaka, Japan, Mayumi Lake has established herself as an artist and educator working as Associate Director of Photography Facilities Department at Art Institute. In 2021, Lake had solo shows at Ignition Project in Chicago and Lubeznik Center for the Arts in Michigan City, IN. Her recent photo-sculpture series, UNISON, was inspired by Japanese kimono motifs and won several commission projects including a public installation for O’Hare airport’s International Terminal expansion to be completed this summer.

Yu Yamauchi
Born and raised in Japan, Yu Yamauchi is a self-taught fine art photographer. He received honorable mention at the 2008 New Cosmos of Photography (Japan) and the 2009 International Photography Award in Fine Art (USA). His notable DAWN series, capturing the myriad of clouds below the peak of Mt. Fuji, is part of important public and private collections in Japan, China, and the United States. His latest monograph Planet is a documentary/memoir of his journey throughout Mongolia over the past few years, a little-known territory with striking contrasts between the rural and the urban.

Daisuke Yokota
Tokyo-based Daisuke Yokota is a 2016 Paul Huf Award winner and regarded as one of the most exciting and innovative young Japanese photographers working today. Yokota produces atmospheric works by flowing easily between analog and digital processes to achieve beautifully degraded and layered images. Last year, his “Matter/Burn Out” series (2016) was shortlisted for the 9th cycle of Prix Pictet with the theme of “Fire” and exhibited in a traveling exhibition initiated at the Victoria & Albert Museum in December 2021. His solo exhibition “Room/Untitled” will be on view at Tokyo’s Fugensha Gallery until February 6.