Yumiko Chiba Associates viewing room shinjuku is pleased to present, an exhibition of a photographic record by Mitsumasa Fujitsuka, who photographed a joint workspace, a bar called Supper Club Cazador, in Shinjuku, Tokyo, which was produced by Shiro Kuramata and Jiro Takamatsu.

In Japan, from the end of the ’60s to the beginning of ’70s, the people who expressed themselves in various fields—art, music, architecture, photography, design, and drama—joined together and further developed their activities, spurring one another on. In the meantime, they posed a fundamental inquiry of what an artistic expression should be and what is the grounds for being so, in their performances achieved in such an inspiring circumstances.

With such a background at the time, Kuramata, who had established his own design practice, took on the interior of the Supper Club Cazador in 1967 and commissioned Takamatsu to create a mural for its walls. Through their collaboration, a new space was established inside the bar, which was illusory yet real, crossing shadows on the walls painted by Takamatsu with real shadows. Here, presence (the real shadows) coexisted with absence (the mural shadows), and the state was visualized. Takamatsu simply created the shadows (from his Shadow series) in the mural, thus he could release them from the existing frame of art and came to realize more genuine concept of absence. Kuramata also presented a new state of space and its concept beyond the scope of interior design. Fujitsuka, who had been taking photos of Kuramata’s works, mentioned that Kuramata must have been awakened by a “philosophical logic of space” after his collaboration with Takamatsu.

The exhibition is a cooperation by Itaru Hirano, the chief curator of the Museum of Modern Art, Saitama. It aims to reveal the concepts of Takamatsu and Kuramata in each production and to expose the characteristics of their time through Fujitsuka’s photographs of Takamatsu’s mural drawings from his Shadow series.

This exhibition features a hardly-publicly-known, very rare photographic record of the production of the collaborative space by Shiro Kuramata and Jiro Takamatsu, who were in the leading positions in their fields of interior design and contemporary art in Japan, respectively.

*image (left)
©The Estate of Jiro Takamatsu, Courtesy of Yumiko Chiba Associates
Photo: FUJITSUKA Mitsumasa