We are delighted to present the exhibition of Hideki Kuwajima,“Tone Scape". This will be the second time we have hosted his exhibition since 2011 at YOD gallery.

Agathe de Bailliencourt works on canvas, paper, and directly onto space, architecture and nature with site-specific installations. Each medium mutually influences the others. The regular back-and-forth between the work in the studio and the outdoor installations helps her to change the perspective and develop the work further. 

Hideki Kuwajima is known as a photographer for a series of works which capture multilayers of light and shadow with the use of transparency in glasses. In this time, however, he tries a new idea which is that he captures images of the cities of Kyoto and Osaka in his works. Osaka is where he was born and grew up and Kyoto is where he has started living since last year. He faces these two cities with his camera seeing how he could create art works from these landscapes. 

In his new works, it is notable that he uses two different types of photographic films and in some cases he repeated this multiple times, duplicating these films in order to adjust a gradation of black-and-white. This process makes him taking a great deal of time and labor. But why does he choose analogue techniques of making in this time? Today, digital technique is used everywhere in our life and he also uses it in making some of his works. This is one of the reasons he chose to use analogue techniques as he thinks that it is important to consider which technique he uses and why he chooses that from the beginning. Another reason is that the time-taking process in which he dismantles the images and reconstructs into a new image with them gives time for him to create images that he wants to make. Finally he creates a new scape as a result of the reconstruction of the images, in which you can see the artist’s strict control and it is his high sense of configuration that is often seen in his past works. In this exhibition, new and unique sceneries are constructed by the artist, this is a sort of new challenge for him in terms of the use of a landscape yet it can also be said that the way of construction of these images is consistent with those of his past works.

”Tone Scape”

I do not bring my camera with me when I am out, so when the need to take a photography comes up, the usual scape looks suddenly different to me.

The things I saw through the squared frame of the camera are taken into a film as a past, and my heart gets excited about the next thing I will see when turning a corner. So I come and go between the past and the future.

I dismantle negatives of films which capture the fragmented images of those things, and I connect them together like searching for the images in the future. I repeat the reconstruction of the images as if experimenting. 

The new images are created by distorting the time of the recorded images, so these are my own very subjective sceneries that only I can know.