Kwai Fung Hin Art Gallery is proud to present Catching Eye, Catching Mind – Solo Exhibition of Daido Moriyama this October. The exhibition will feature 80 works from different periods in the artist’s career, from 1971 to the present day, including his most iconic photograph, Stray Dog (1971).

Born in 1938 in Osaka, Japan, Daido Moriyama is one of the leading figures in postwar photography in Japan.

Moriyama’s early photographs appear exceptionally grainy and often lean towards abstraction with their blurring of figures. These early works include Moriyama’s most famous photograph, the iconic Stray Dog from 1971. Often called his unofficial self-portrait, Stray Dog has become a metaphor for the artist himself. Moriyama has never had a fixed location for his shooting; rather, he wanders the streets, lingering here and there as if searching for food. He once jokingly described his way of street shooting, "I'm shooting as if a dog is excreting in the street."

He adopts his uniquely grainy, blurry and out-of-focus style of aesthetics and experiments with techniques in the dark room. The images might be unclear and ambiguous but this is exactly how his experience at street level impacts him. In recent years, in his travels to international cities, Moriyama continues to document street scenes and cityscapes in a similar manner – seeking inspiration in everyday life. His interpretation of this “fleeting reality” of his surroundings shows a unique side of each city he visits. Wandering the streets, Moriyama captures not only moments in time, but also an emotional, characteristic of a city, each full of its own anxieties, desires, and charm.

“I love cities very much, especially big cities. 

In a bigger city, 

there is a bigger variety of people, more stories and a higher mobility. 

A city consists of the desire of the people and the society;

 it is a state of chaos. 

I am very interested in shooting these feelings of ambiguous desires. 

To me, every city is a piece of art in itself. 

|I do not need to create art; 

I just need to shoot what exactly the city is. 

This is why I never get tired of shooting in the streets even after 

doing it for so many years.”

—Daido Moriyama

Since his first solo exhibition in Austria in 1980, Moriyama has frequently participated in large-scale exhibitions in Japan and abroad, including Stray Dog, an important retrospective exhibition of Moriyama at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1999, through which he earned greater international recognition. He held solo exhibitions in London and New York in 2002, as well as a retrospective exhibition at Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain, Paris in 2003. In 2004, Moriyama received the Cultural Award from the German Photographic Association and a Lifetime Achievement Award from The Photographic Society of Japan. In 2008, his retrospective exhibition Hawaii was held at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. Most recently, Moriyama was the Recipient for Lifetime Achievement, awarded by the International Centre of Photography in 2012. That same year, he had a joint exhibition with William Klein at the Tate Modern, London.

His works have been collected by numerous museums including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Getty Museum, Los Angeles, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Centre Pompidou, Paris.