Taisuke Koyama “Tokyo Photographic Research #01: Phase Trans” （G/P Gallery）

Taisuke Koyama “Tokyo Photographic Research #01: Phase Trans”

Finished

Artists

Taisuke Koyama

Tokyo Photographic Research (below TPR), is a contemporary photography project initiated by Koyama and Junya Yamamine (curator of Contemporary Art Gallery, Art Tower Mito). TPR is an endeavor to capture the appearance of Tokyo, heading towards the hosting of the Olympics through researches and works composed via various artists’ perspectives, and aims for the resulting works to be passed on to the post-2020 world. This exhibition, the first of many TPRs to come, features the latest installation piece by Taisuke Koyama ー who returned to Japan at the end of last year after four years of stay in London and Amsterdam — composed of both photography and video works created via his field research of Tokyo. Throughout the years, the unique qualities of Tokyo has attracted many photographers, who documented the state of its transformation—of each generation and through each individual perspective—by means of various methodologies. Koyama too, chose Tokyo as the field of his photography, just as he was starting his career as a photographer in the beginning of 2000s, and the resulting photobook, entropix, published in 2008, display Koyama’s attempts to capture vividly, the surface of the city — which he interpreted as an organically modifying phenomenon — through a microscopic point-of-view; this marked the beginning of his venture into the practice of abstract and experimental photography. In 2009, he presented Rainbow Form (2009), a close-up photography work of rainbow colored advertisement posters, and the series Rainbow Variations, which derived five variations until 2016: Melting Rainbow (2010), Rainbow Waves (2013), Seventh Depth (2014), Pico (2015), and the video work Pico – Infinity / Pico – Flash (2016), is widely known as Koyama’s most representative work, demonstrating his pursuit of the possibilities of the essential elements of photography — reproduction, iteration, and the fluidity of the digital image. Starting with a piece consisted of error images, which result from use of the data recovery software in the restoration process of his purposefully deleted photographs of Tokyo and a piece displaying the perceptual discord arising from contact between the projected image and the surface the image is projected on, in this exhibition, we showcase Koyama’s latest oeuvre, where he set Tokyo as its motif once again. The images, which not only embody the possibilities arising through technological advancements, but also their fallacies and misuse, reveal his consistent research on the constantly renewing history of photography and image making.

Events
Talk Event: 2018. 4.27 Fri. 18:00-19:00
Guests: Junya Yamamine (Curator, Contemporary Art Gallery, Art Tower Mito), Taisuke Koyama
Moderator: Shigeo Goto (Director, G/P gallery, Tokyo)
Japanese Only