ShugoArts is pleased to present “THE CRIMSON SUN,” an exhibition featuring the work of two artists, Taguchi Kazuna and Iwanaga Tadasuke. This exhibition is the culmination of a an idea that Taguchi had in the spring of 2011, when she was residing in Budapest and Iwanaga was in Kyushu Prefecture researching magic.

Since returning in February 2012 from a one-year residence in Vienna, Taguchi has been experimenting with the use of chemical processing to colorize the silver halide in black and white photographic paper. In her work titled blueness of the blue, which is currently included in the group show “somewhere between me and this world” at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, the blue-colored image she achieved from a reaction between the potassium ferricyanide and iron ions during toning is still unstable and continues to change. At “THE CRIMSON SUN,” Taguchi will display works that have been made using her usual technique of photographing a painting she has made but that have also gone through a further stage of colorizing using developing and toning techniques.

For Tadasuke Iwanaga, this is his first exhibition since the National Museum of Art, Osaka’s “Garden of Painting: Japanese Art of the 00s,” which was held three years ago. “Hexagram,” a series he painted in 2007, suggests through the use of color a hexagram being burned or destroyed. Meanwhile, his 2008 work, “Anno Domini 2008,” conveys the artist’s belief that information conveyed solely by the subtle use of color can nevertheless stimulate and liberate the senses. In “THE CRIMSON SUN” his layering of transparent colors gives way to a complex illusion, by which the colors appear to be continually changing. Titled heptagram, the work takes its name from a shape that is theoretically impossible.