From July 3, 2010 to August 1, 2010, Japanese photographer Ken Kitano will host his solo exhibition our face at Three Shadows Photography Art Centre.
Ken Kitano was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1968. In 1991, he graduated from the College of Science and Technology at Nihon University in Tokyo, Japan. In 1993, he became an independent photographer. In 1989 he began taking photographs, and in 1993, he held his first solo exhibition. Since then, his works have entered collections both inside and outside of Japan.
Since he began taking photographs in 1989, Ken Kitano’s photography has always focused on time and existence. In his early series FLOW AND FUSION, his lens focused on Tokyo and its suburbs, photographing the crowded streams of people and cars in the city center during rush hour. In this series, Kitano exposed the film for anywhere from a few seconds to a few hours. Because of the effects of shutter speed, the moving groups of people become like running water or fog. The resulting ghostly shapes do not have bodily contours, as if the pictures have caught the moment in which the people evaporated. Figures appear as particles, and so people of different ages, genders, and races are mixed together and even fused into one another in a crowded Tokyo street. Meanwhile, the inanimate architecture and street-side shop signs in the photograph are solidified, while all other living things have lost their shape or left behind a trail like the tail of a comet.
In 1999, Kitano began to experiment with portraiture. He took portraits of different people who lived in the same area, held the same job, or were the same gender. After precise calculations, he exposes each portrait negative for a very short period of time, one after the other. The size of the subject on every negative is different, the angle of the portrait is different, and the subject’s position on the negative is different. So, every time a new negative needs to be put into the enlarger, the photo paper has to be covered and the new negative realigned using the subject’s eyes. In this process, twenty, thirty, or even forty negatives are exposed onto the paper one by one to form a new portrait. In each “metaportrait,” the eyes are distinct, but the exterior outline of the resulting figure does not have any similarities to any single person in the negatives. Thus, these overlapping images form a new life. In the last several years, Kitano has been all over Asia working on this project, and he plans to continue this project in America, Europe, and Africa.
Since 2007, Ken Kitano has extended his early long-exposure technique; in some cases his exposure times have lasted as long as twenty-four hours. In this body of work, his photographs no longer have traces of movement; they are now only scenes empty of people, with the path of the sun traced out in the sky. The atmosphere of mystery created by the halo on one side of Mount Fuji and the glow in the sky above Tokyo cannot help but make us think about what photography truly is. Photography aims to capture a moment in the limitlessness of time, or to break time into the smallest possible units. The world that our naked eye sees is in fact the overlapping memories of countless consecutive moments left on our retina. However, Ken Kitano’s experiments seem to break through this seizure of a moment, showing those countless moments simultaneously on a single negative. Although we are unable to distinguish the outline of a give moment, we know that, in this twenty-four hour exposure time, all moments have been left behind on a negative.
During the exhibition period, Three Shadows Photography Art Centre will also host events related to our face. On July 10 at 1pm, Ken Kitano will host a symposium on experimental portraits in Japanese and Chinese contemporary photography. Chinese and Japanese critics, curators, and other art professionals have been invited to participate. On July 17 at 10am, Kitano will host a darkroom workshop to allow the public to better understand his printing methods.
