Tokyo Gallery + BTAP is pleased to announce a solo exhibition by Shigeki Yoshida entitled “Ground Bass – Everyday Life and Silence”.

Shigeki Yoshida was born in Ibaraki prefecture in 1963. After graduating from Wako University in 1987, he began exhibiting prints and paintings. A stint in New York in 1997 as an overseas researcher for the Agency for Cultural Affairs, however, inspired Yoshida to shift his base to the US. Subsequently, he enrolled in the MFA program at the Hunter College of the City University of New York, where he expanded the scope of his practice from printmaking to photography. Today, Yoshida continues to work as a photographer.

Inspired by “the prospect of being able to capture, through the medium of photography, things that may not be clearly visible to the human eye”, Yoshida creates black-and-white photos that focus on the theme of light. Light, however, is itself an insubstantial entity – we become aware of it for the first time only when it is reflected off some other object. With absolute conviction, Yoshida trains his camera on his subjects. “Even though black-and-white photography tends to be viewed as a medium whose possibilities have been exhausted, I see it as a means of capturing (or a support that showcases) light patterns that shift from one moment to another, never assuming the same appearance twice.”

At his one-man show at Tokyo Gallery in 2008, Yoshida exhibited square-format works from his black-and-white series “Identical Light”, which he began in 2000. The light mentioned in the title of the exhibition refers to the theme that Yoshida has devoted himself to up until now. At this upcoming solo show, which is a sort of sequel to the previous one, he will exhibit panoramic works from his new series, “Ground Bass – Everyday Life and Silence”.

The obsessive, almost relentless attention to the details of shadows found in the real world is further accentuated in these new works. The photos on display conjure a world in which various “refrains” – to use a musical term – seem to overlap and intertwine. These “refrains” consist of alternating, repeating periods of movement and rest that play out on a daily basis: activity and respite in our daily lives, unfolding like identical phrases. Cocking an ear in the direction of the low, bass-like tones that reside there, we become aware of these faint, echo-like sounds.

Yoshida has previously said that “if literature is the task of putting into words that which eludes language, perhaps the task of photography is to make visible what is ordinarily invisible”. Music is created when we train our ears to listen to voices amid the silence, while photography comes about when we become sensible to the presence of light within shadow. The real work of photographers like Yoshida, then, consists in the act of creating a space where the mind – and not just our ears, eyes, and senses – can travel.

This exhibition showcases some 30 black-and-white silver gelatin prints from Yoshida’s most recent series of work.

During the opening reception on June 8 (Fri), starting at 18:00, there will also be a talk on photography by the artist and Taka Kawachi, chief curator of the amana photo collection, which handles Japanese corporate collections of works by young photographers – an enterprise that is still fairly uncommon in Japan. In addition, Tokyo Gallery will be open until 21:00, in conjunction with Ginza Galleries’ “Yakai”, a special event during which galleries in the Ginza area will extend their opening hours late into the evening.

We hope you take this opportunity to visit the gallery and view Shigeki Yoshida’s works.