Ryuhei Yokoyama Solo Exhibition
“HOLES and SCARS”
■Venue
■Period
■Hours
KANA KAWANISHI GALLERY
4-7-6 Shirakawa, Koto-ku, Tokyo 135-0021 JAPAN *car parking available in front of the gallery
June 10th (Friday), 2022 - July 16th (Saturday), 2022
Wednesdays through Saturdays, 13:00 - 19:00
(closed on Sundays, Mondays, Tuesdays, and National Holidays)
2021 | mixed media (UV print/pigment foil on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag Baryta paper) | 841 × 1189 mm © Ryuhei Yokoyama, courtesy KANA KAWANISHI GALLERY
2021 | mixed media (UV print/pigment foil on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag Baryta paper) | 841 × 1189 mm © Ryuhei Yokoyama, courtesy KANA KAWANISHI GALLERY
Bag, from the series STUFF
2021 | mixed media (UV print/pigment foil on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag Baryta paper) | 841 × 1189 mm
© Ryuhei Yokoyama, courtesy KANA KAWANISHI GALLERY
KANA KAWANISHI GALLERY is pleased to present “HOLES and SCARS,” a solo exhibition by Ryuhei Yokoyama starting June 10, 2022.
Yokoyama is a Japanese photographer who questions “what is a city?” by capturing Tokyo with monochrome film. In the WALL series, which has been exhibited since 2020, he created a new style of urban landscape photography, inspired by his lifework of thousands of archival photographs of graffiti in Shibuya and the changing nature of the urban landscape.
In this exhibition, Yokoyama will present a further sterical view of the city by combining his new series, STUFF, with his representative series, WALL. These photographs of various objects lying on the street are printed out and then, like a cityscape left out in the open or like long-loved old clothes, undergo a condensed process of weathering to completion. To recoil from the concept of mass production and mass consumption in contemporary society, which places value only on brand new objects, the artist takes great care in each step of the process, from the selection of the subject matter to the printing process, suggesting that the actual value lies in the passage of time and the appearance of weathering, and thus concentrates these images as a new perception of the city.
We cordially invite all to HOLES and SCARS, the first solo exhibition at KANA KAWANISHI GALLERY by Ryuhei Yokoyama, who has been increasingly gaining recognition in Japan and abroad while he continuously pursues unique and unprecedented street photography.
Artist Statement
Boots wore down that they could not hold their posture, a bag with cracked skin, a straw hat with frayed holes, a plastic umbrella with a broken bone. All of these things danced in front of me as I walked the streets. My gaze was intensely and irresistibly reflecting everything I had experienced through the books, music, and images I had seen and heard. The city, rebellion, and freedom. They seemed to be telling me that change is always made not by glittering things but by those that have been damaged to wear and tear.
This exhibition attempts to present a slice of the urban landscape by combining the WALL series, which focuses on the existence of miscellaneous walls on the street, and the STUFF series, which is an accumulation of objects lying on the street. When considering the city, which itself is based on the speed of demolition and construction, the main themes running through both series were “to become a new aspect through continuous loss and damage,” “to be lost through continuous addition and multiplication,” and “to continue to drift homogeneously between disappearance and emergence.” The images intentionally destroyed from the selection of media to the printing process are an act of materialization of all these themes. They also serve as a device to connect the inescapably private artist’s view of the city, as mentioned above.
HOLES and SCARS—My jeans were always damaged and torn. My time spent in the city had been much like that. My photographs are neither records nor memories but the fading present.
Ryuhei Yokoyama
Artist Profile
Ryuhei Yokoyama was born in 1979. With the theme of “What is a city?” his works are mainly street snapshots taken with monochrome film. He creates images of the city in flux, changing his viewpoints and approaches.
His major solo exhibitions include “THE WALL SONG / Rebellion and Freedom” (2022, +81 Gallery – Kyoto, Japan), “WALL SONG” (2021, BAF STUDIO, Tokyo), “WALL stanza” (2020, Fujii Daimaru, Kyoto, Japan), and “Silence and Stillness” (2017, KYOTOGRAPHIE KG+, Kyoto, Japan).
Group exhibitions include “STORAGE” (2021, Black Storage Fujii Daimaru, Kyoto, Japan), “Some kinda freedom” (2021, KANA KAWANISHI GALLERY, Tokyo, Japan), “A new generation of Japanese Photographers” (2019 Dali International Photography Exhibition, China), and “off the record vol.12 aube artistique” (2019, In )( between gallery, Paris).
His major monographs include Graffiti History of Mice Dancing with Light, Beautiful as if Written on Paper Scraps Rolling in the Wind (2018, BUFFALO PRESS).
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