Takeshi Takeda "Great Yangtze River"

Ginza Nikon Salon (Nikon Plaza)

Finished

Artists

Takeshi Takeda

The great Yangtze River in China has attracted a lot of attention from historians as the area where rice cultivation originated. For five years from 1997, the artist visited various ancient archaeological sites in the Yangtze Basin as part of a research team to take photographic records of the discovered remains. He noticed the unchanged richness of the area which gave birth to rice agriculture almost 6000 years ago, and was gradually captivated by the great river itself. With the completion of the research, he started on a solo investigation of the Basin, which lasted three years. He travelled the 6300 km from the snowy mountain source in the Tibetan Highlands to the estuaries in the East China Sea. Even now, one can still meet the diverse cultures of peoples nurtured throughout history. There are the Tibetans who live a nomadic life in the highlands at an altitude of 5000m, the Nasik people with their matrilineal society, the Miao people who still carry on the old tradition of rice terrace cultivation... and if you look carefully, you realize that what lies beneath is a common hope of coexistence with nature. Some honour the snowy mountains, some worship the trees in the forest, and there are those who believe in the mysteries of the flowing water; these prayers can relate back to the spirit of the Japanese. As the artist followed the Yangtze River, he continued to ask himself "what is the root of Asia?". He explained that he was searching for the "landscape of the mind-field" that the Japanese people have rapidly lost.
After ten years of research, the artist feels that he has come closer to the answer. He will present it in a series of 55 colour photographs.

Schedule

Jan 30 (Mon) 2006-Feb 10 (Fri) 2006