Hiroji Kubota "Images of Asia" 1 June, 2001 [Fri] - 30 June, 2001 [Sat]

As an active member of Magnum Photos, and the sole member joining the cooperative from Asia, Hiroji Kubota has been focusing his interest particularly on Asian affairs in the last quarter of the 20th Century. Kubota's photographic activities have been covering China, as the center of Asia in geology, history and culture, two countries in tension on the Korean Peninsula, and many other Asian countries including Japan, Myanmar, and Indonesia. His keen eyes have captured and recorded from all angles political and economic developments after the war, urban complexity against nature, environmental issues and food problems, and of course native festivals and traditional cultures in these regions.

Kubota is showing at this exhibition 36 of his images carefully selected from a pile of photographs taken from 1978 to 95. The all images exhibited are dye-transfer color prints. This technique is dying lately, but his encounter with an Indian
printer with a magical hand around 1992 in Germany only made it possible to paint the documents in color to impress the photographer to the degree where he called them "Ukiyoe Contemporary".

Profile
Hiroji Kubota was born in Tokyo in 1939. After graduating from Waseda University, Tokyo, with BA in political science in 1962, he moved to the U.S., where he started his photographic carrier in 1965. He returned to Tokyo in 1968 and began an extensive coverage of affairs in Asia. He became a full member of Magnum Photos in 1987. His works have been published and exhibited at major museums and galleris throughout the world. His tour exhibitions includes "China", "Out of the East: Transition and Tradition in Asia" and "Can We Feed Ourselves", and one of his books "China" has been published in the U.S., Germany, France, England and Japan.