Group Show
Alix Marie, Antony Cairns, Daniel Blaufuks, JH Engström, Lin Zhipeng (林志鹏) aka No.223, XU ZHEN®, Marefumi KOMURA
* The gallery will be closed at 5:00pm on December 24
GALLERY HOURS | Thu.–Sat. 11:00–13:00, 14:00–19:00
CLOSED | Sun–Wed., National Holidays
Alix Marie
Antony Cairns
Daniel Blaufuks
JH Engström
Lin Zhipeng aka No.223
XU ZHEN®
Marefumi Komura
Yuko Mohri
Artists
Alix Marie
アリックス・マリー
Alix Marie (b.1989) is a French multidisciplinary artist who lives between London and Paris, working mostly across the mediums of photography, sculpture and installation. She graduated from Central Saint Martins College, London, in 2011 with a first class honours degree in fine art and later completed an MA in photography at the Royal College of Art, London. Marie’s work explores our relationship to bodies and their representation with an interest in addressing gender stereotypes through visceral, genuine and an often humorous approach. In 2019 she was awarded the Vic Odden Award by the Royal Photographic Society for a notable achievement in the art of photography by an artist aged 35 or under and nominated for the European Month Of Photography Arendt Award 2019. Recent solo and group exhibitions include: Styx, National Center for Photography, Ballarat (solo, 2021), Nude, Fotografiska Stockholm (2021), Photoworks festival: Propositions for Alternative Narratives, Brighton (2020), Athens Photo Festival, Benaki Museum, Athens (2020), Sucer La Nuit, Musée des Beaux Arts, Le Locle (solo, 2019), Shredded, Roman Road, London (solo, 2019), Peer to Peer, SCOP, Shanghai (2019) .
Antony Cairns
アントニー・ケアンズ
Antony Cairns (b. London, 1980) takes photographs at night, using the available light cast by buildings in urban centers like London, Tokyo and Los Angeles. In many cases the structures that he chooses are still under construction, little more than the skeletons of the office buildings and luxury apartments of that they are destined to become. His work is resolutely non-topographic, in the conventional sense in which photography has been used to record spaces, structures and architectural styles. There is more, however, to Cairns’s work than simply his distinctive approach to picturing the urban environment. His is a practice that accepts and embraces the photographic medium in its sophisticated entirety: from the effect use of light on analogue film, through a range of experimental darkroom processes, to an innovative and highly specialized understanding of the supports available to the photographic image in the twenty-first century.
Cairns presents his work in a number of complementary but contrasting ways: from painstakingly layered and assembled artists books LDN (2010), LPT (2012), OSC (2016); to translucent films of silver gelatin applied directly to sheets of aluminium, LDN2 (2013), LDN3 (2014); to experiments with electronic ink, both in working Amazon Kindle reading tablets hacked to contain his complete work, LDN EI (2015); and on their extracted frozen screens; strange distant descendants of the daguerreotype, TYO2 (2017). Cairns was also the winner of the 2015 Hariban Prize, resulting in a residency at the Benrido Collotype atelier in Kyoto. Once again faced with the possibility of extending and expanding the photographic image through its reproducible character Cairns made a series of interventions within, and interpretations of, the collotype process LA-LV (2016). Cairns has recently begun to explore the prehistory of the digital age in several related ways, by printing his works and assembling them as montages on early computer punch cards, OSC Osaka Station City (2016) and by using the screens of outmoded digital cameras and equipment to screen and project his work. He has a forthcoming project at the V&A in London in 2023. Cairns has exhibited and published widely, in Europe, the United States and Japan. He has published many books of his work including CTY (2017) with Morel Books/Akio Nagasawa Publishing and Computer punch card selected artworks (2021) with Morel Books.
He lives and works in London.
Daniel Blaufuks
ダニエル・ブラーフックス
Daniel Blaufuks has been working on the relation between photography and literature, through works like My Tangier with the writer Paul Bowles. More recently, Collected Short Stories displays several photographic diptychs in a kind of “snapshot prose,” a speech based on visual fragments that give indication of private stories on their way to become public. The relation between public and private has been one of the constant interrogations in his work. He has been showing widely and works mainly in photography and video, presenting his work through books, installations and films. His documentary Under Strange Skies was shown at the Lincoln Center in New York.
Recent exhibitions include: Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, Palazzo delle Papesse, Siena, LisboaPhoto, Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon, Elga Wimmer Gallery, New York, Museu do Chiado, Lisboa, Photoespaña, Madrid, where his book Under Strange Skies received the award for Best Photography Book of the Year in the International Category in 2007, the year he received the BES Photo Award as well. He published Terezín at Steidl, Götingen in 2010 and in 2011 he had a solo show at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro and in 2014 at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Lisbon. In 2017 he was awarded the AICA-MC Award for the exhibitions Léxico and Attempting Exhaustion in the previous year.
aniel Blaufuks uses mainly photography and video, presenting his work through books, installations and films. He has a predilection for issues such as the connection between time and space and the intersection between private and public memory.
JH Engström
JH・エグルストーム
Born in 1969 in Karlstad, Sweden.
Lives and works between Smedsby, Värmland and Paris.
In 1997 he graduated from the Photography and Film department at Gothenburg University. Engstrom has shown work internationally in many exhibitions.
JH Engström is also an inveterate bookmaker. Revoir is his 15th monograph. Many of his books has won awards and prizes. Among them Trying to Dance which was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Prize 2005, From Back Home (together with Anders Petersen) was awarded ”The photo book award 2009” at the International Arles Photo festival. His book La Residence was awarded ”Goldene Letter 2012” by the Deutsche Buch Stiftung.
2015 his book Tout va Bien won the Leica Oskar Barnack Award.
JH Engström is represented by Galerie Jean Kenta Gauthier in Paris
Lin Zhipeng (林志鹏) aka No.223
リン・チーペン(林志鹏)aka No.223
Lin Zhipeng (aka No.223) born in Guangdong in 1979, Lin Zhipeng is a photographer and freelance writer based in Beijing. Created in 2003, his blog “North Latitude 23” where he published everyday pictures accompanied by short texts received million views and made him famous among the web community. Presented for ten years in group exhibitions in China and abroad, Lin’s works have also been the object of several solo shows both nationally and internationally (Walther Collection Ulm; De Sarthe Gallery Beijing; Stieglitz19 Gallery Antwerp; M97 Gallery Shanghai; Delaware Contemporary Museum, etc). He has published photography books in Taiwan, France, Canada and Japan.
Lin is a leading figure of new Chinese photography emerging in the last decade, popularizing his work originally via social media and other online platforms as well as his self-published zines. Lin’s work has come to reflect and define a certain zeitgeist of the post-80’s and 90’s generation of non-mainstream Chinese youth. Amidst an otherwise conservative and often closed traditional society and cultural background, Lin’s photographs act as a collective not-so-private diary of a young generation wishing to escape the pressures from a high-stakes society and play within its limits. Faded flowers tangled with flesh tones, myriad patterns mixing with an emotional ambiguity of both love and chaos, fantasy and eroticism. 223’s works are saturated with a soft sense of carefreeness, a playful innocence, and a certain optimism amidst a hedonist lifestyle going against the expected pleasures and entrapments of the middleclass dream.
Naming himself “No.223” after the police character in Wong Kar-Wai’s movie Chungking Express, Lin also adopts a sense of the Hong Kong director’s poetic and dreamy atmosphere as well as the loneliness and mystery of many of his film’s characters. Lin Zhipeng offers his point of view on an alternative youth spirit and culture in an often conservatively Chinese cultural context. His spontaneous photographs portray a young generation who indulge in love and life, oscillating between jubilation and deep melancholy, playful sexuality and often just the simple human need to be loved in an otherwise indifferent and ever-changing society.
XU ZHEN®
徐震®
XU ZHEN®, founded by artist Xu Zhen in 2013, is the flagship art brand of MadeIn Company. Born in 1977, Xu Zhen is a leading Chinese artist and curator, and the founder of MadeIn Company. XU ZHEN® is committed to art creation and cutting-edge culture development. Through collecting and appreciating artworks and events produced by XU ZHEN®, users can enjoy spiritual aspirations and life experiences of the finest quality.
XU ZHEN®, founded by artist Xu Zhen in 2013, is the flagship art brand of MadeIn Company. Born in 1977, Xu Zhen is a leading Chinese artist and curator, and the founder of MadeIn Company. XU ZHEN® is committed to art creation and cutting-edge culture development. Through collecting and appreciating artworks and events produced by XU ZHEN®, users can enjoy spiritual aspirations and life experiences of the finest quality.
Xu Zhen
Artist, Curator, MadeIn Company Founder
Xu Zhen was born in 1977, and lives and works in Shanghai.
Xu Zhen has been considered as an iconic figure in Chinese contemporary art. In 2004, Xu won the prize for ‘Best Artist’ at the China Contemporary Art Award. His practice covers various media such as installations, video, painting and performance, etc.
Xu Zhen has exhibited internationally, at museums and biennales, such as, Venice Biennale (2001, 2005), The Museum of Modern Art (New York, 2004), Mori Art Museum (Tokyo, 2005), MoMA PS1 (New York, 2006), Tate Liverpool (2007), Hayward Gallery (London, 2012), Lyon Biennial (2013), Armory Show (New York, 2014), Long Museum (Shanghai 2015), Al Riwaq Art Center (Qatar, 2016), Sydney Biennial (2016), Guggenheim Museum (New York, 2017), among others.
Aside from being an artist, Xu Zhen is also a curator. He co-curated together with other artists major exhibitions in Shanghai and was one of the initiators of Art-Ba-Ba (www.art-ba-ba.com), a leading online forum for discussion and critique of contemporary art in Shanghai, in 2006. In 2009, Xu Zhen established ‘MadeIn Company’, a contemporary art creation corporate, focused on the production of creativity, and devoted to the research of contemporary culture’s infinite possibilities. In 2013, MadeIn Company launched XU ZHEN® which is committed to art creation and cutting-edge culture development. In 2014, MadeIn Company established MadeIn Gallery and in November 2016 launched the first “Xu Zhen Store” in Shanghai.
Marefumi KOMURA
小村希史
1977, Japan
Lives and works in Tokyo.
Selected Exhibitions:
2021 Horizon AKIO NAGASAWA GALLERY, Tokyo
2019 Diamond AKIO NAGASAWA GALLERY, Tokyo
2018 Big Ship The Mass, Tokyo
2017 Ginza Morioka-Shoten, Tokyo
2016 Flower Huddle The Mass, Tokyo
2014 3331 Art Fair ‒Various Collectors' Prizes‒ 3331 Arts Chiyoda, Tokyo
2014 Art Stage Singapore
2013 Why not live for Art? II - 9 collectors reveal their treasures Opera City Art Gallery, Tokyo
2013 Small Painting Like Us Megumi Ogita Gallery, Tokyo
2013 Felt Like Painting Felt, Tokyo
2012 New Paintings Megumi Ogita Gallery, Tokyo
2013 Symbiosis Aki Gallery, Taipei, Taiwan
2012 XYZ Megumi Ogita Gallery, Tokyo
2011 Fragment Megumi Ogita Gallery, Tokyo
2009 Feeble Shanghai, China
2008 Painting and Drawing TCP gallery, Tokyo
2008 Faultiness frantic, Tokyo
2007 Untitled, Wall of Sound, Seattle, US
2006 NADA - New Art Dealers Alliance Art Fair Miami 2006
2006 Geisai 2006
Publication
CTY
TEXT by SIMON BAKER
Akio Nagasawa Publishing edition of CTY: a negative-positive reversed and reconstructed version of the Morel Books edition.
Attempting Exhaustion
Between 2009 and 2016, I photographed a table and a window in my kitchen in Lisbon.
I was first attracted by its silence, later by how the objects received the light, and, finally, by their geometrical composition.
I could't help noticing, more and more, how things repeated themselves without truly repeating themselves.
Little changes, almost invisible transformations happened every day, according to weather and season.
– Daniel Blaufuks, afterword
Revoir
In 2004, I made the book Trying to Dance, designed by Patric Leo and published by Journal. Since then, it has lived a life of its own, just as books should do.
For me, Trying to Dance is more than a book – the photographs on which it was based constitute an image universe of its own. Photography then had a liberating effect on me as a visual artist. I lived mostly in New York, but also in Värmland, and travelled a lot in the United States and Europe. Mentally, I was in between worlds, between realities, between the urban and the rural. This was also a period when I questioned and doubted the importance and relevance of photography for me – actually. The freedom I so strongly experienced in the process of making Trying to Dance, largely answered my doubts and became a compass for my continued creativity.
To start with, I was not at all certain when Gösta Flemming at Journal, Patric Leo and Christian Caujolle, suggested going back to the Trying to Dance negatives. But when I started looking through the files – so many images, so many that were not used in Trying to Dance, and so many new combinations that hit me; it was then that I decided that we should publish Revoir.
Revoir is a completely new book, a revision, a revisit to that period between the mid-90s and the early 2000s. The book has been made in close and enjoyable collaboration with all the people that I worked with on Trying to Dance. Around two thirds of the photographs have not been published before. For the first time I have scanned the negatives, together with Ewa-Teréz Gölin, and allowed the present to guide me in the printing for Revoir.
Crash
I do not fully understand it at first.
The gradual and painful insight into a decisive and violent shift.
The world I grew up in is under threat.
The landscapes stretch out, as beautiful and imperturbable as ever.
These landscapes have met my eyes since the day I was born.
I can no longer see them as before
– JH Engström, Smedsby September 2017
The book CRASH is based on a series of landscapes photographed close to JH Engström’s home in Smedsby, Värmland in Sweden.
The collision between the hauntingly beautiful landscapes, surrounding JH Engström in his daily life, and the knowledge of what is happening in the "big world" is the emotional fuel for the book CRASH.
地平線 Horizon (Special Edition)
In occasion of the exhibition 'Horizon' by Marefumi Komura, on show from April 4th to April 24th 2021 at Akio Nagasawa Gallery AOYAMA, the artworks catalogue collecting all the paintings on display has been realised together with its Special Edition.
The Special edition’s cover is a painted canvas, sized 370 x 580mm, which envelops the book. Limited edition of 10 copies, each copy is different and includes small size .
※The color of the collection cannot be specified.