KANA KAWANISHI GALLERY is pleased to present “through glass,” a solo exhibition by Kuraya Takashi starting February 3, 2024. Since making his debut as an artist with so-called “straight photography,” Kuraya has continued to produce various series of works, using photography to expose varied human activities with an ironic eye.

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The new work through glass, which will be presented for the first time at this exhibition, is a series of photographs of photographic dry plates (a type of photosensitive material in which a photographic emulsion is applied to a transparent glass plate; the image is black and white, with light and dark reversed; also called glass plate) circa 1940s, which the artist purchased at an online auction. Among those available, Kuraya selected the photographic dry plates that had scratches and stains, and photographed them so that the scratches and stains could be seen, and reversed the negatives and positives, and then colorized the images using AI.

For Kuraya, who says, “It is important to imagine what was not captured in the photograph as well as its time (that has passed since the photograph was taken),” the scratches and stains on the photographs have as much or more significance than what was captured in the photograph, as they can be triggers for imagining what was not captured in the photographs, or the time that the photographs have passed through. The process of negative-positive reversal and colorization is also an expression of Kuraya’s attitude to “develop” what was not captured in the photograph.

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The series is divided into two types of works: “F” and “A,” with the F utilizing the original photographic images and the A that are mostly dominated by scratches and stains.