KANA KAWANISHI GALLERY is pleased to announce the solo exhibition “camera obscura” by Hideo Anze, opening on Friday, September 19th, 2025.

Hideo Anze is a highly regarded artist known for his conceptual works employing photography. His acclaimed series Stripe (50Hz), of which five pieces are held in the collection of the British Museum (United Kingdom), stands as one of his signature bodies of work. This exhibition, his first at our gallery in three years, centres on new works from the RGB series, which expresses contemporary photography through his unique interpretation.

The RGB series draws inspiration from the fact that William Henry Fox Talbot, inventor of the calotype process, referred to his technique not as “photography” but as “photogenic drawing,” meaning “drawing with light.” These works are created by collecting images of paintings universally recognized as “masterpieces” from the internet, then rendering the images’ RGB histogram—a graphical display of the brightness levels of the pixels (image data) that make up the digital image—and painting it onto a canvas of the same dimensions. This exhibition centres on new works within the series, primarily featuring motifs from 13 paintings by Johannes Vermeer.

​

Vermeer, a leading figure of the Dutch Golden Age in the 17th century, is renowned for his ability to express the narrative quality of his subjects through delicate light and shadow within tranquil interiors. He is also known for his mastery of light and the precision and meticulousness of his perspective, and some researchers and art historians have suggested he may have used the camera obscura as a visual aid.

​While the camera obscura is thought to have emerged as an optical device around the 15th century, the RGB color system, which developed in the mid-20th century, stands in contrast alongside advances in television and computer display technology. Vermeer’s works expanded the horizons of pictorial expression using medieval optical devices, and Anze’s RGB, which employs the contemporary RGB color system—a visual system of light— transforms digital images from reproducible entities back into unique paintings.

​

We cordially invite all to this exhibition that invites us to re-examine the relationship between light and vision, technology and art, and fundamentally questions the nature of photography in the contemporary era.