Taka Ishii Gallery is pleased to present our 17th solo exhibition with Nobuyoshi Araki, “Film Nostalgia” from May 7 to May 28. The show will feature more than 600 new pieces from 11 different bodies of work.

Photography, well, not so much photography but life itself, is nostalgia I realized, having seen these moments: in this day and age of digital media, in the center of Tokyo you see these sticks, right, they take these sticks and chase around crayfish and carp. Boyhood memories and stuff, that sort of nostalgia is the most important thing in life, the old man has realized (laughs).

March 2011, Nobuyoshi Araki

Having survived prostate cancer, Araki contemplated his own death and conflicts in his work “2THESKY, my Ender”; soon thereafter, on 2 March 2010, Araki faced the death of his beloved cat “Chiro” – whom he had lived together with since his wife Yoko’s death. Happy times passed through into the past, leaving Araki to live in the past. As he watched children play innocently in a city park, Araki determined that the thoughts that conjure memories of happiness – nostalgia – is indeed life itself.

As well as “It Was Once a Paradise”, which documented his balcony where he dined with his wife Yoko and where his cat Chiro played, the exhibited pieces display that Araki’s Eros (life/sex), “To live is to photograph” as he puts it, has not waned in the least.

This is an opportunity to witness Araki’s challenge to the legendary Japanese ukiyo-e and print artist Katsushika Hokusai, who left behind a corpus of 30,000 works and who called himself “The old man, a painting maniac”. Araki, who has gone to the extreme in using film as means of artistic expression, calls himself "The old man A, a photo maniac”.