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  ©Kikuji Kawada

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  ©Kikuji Kawada

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  ©Kikuji Kawada

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  ©Kikuji Kawada

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  ©Kikuji Kawada

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  ©Kikuji Kawada

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  ©Kikuji Kawada

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  ©Kikuji Kawada

Kikuji Kawada (b. 1933) is one of Japan’s most renowned photographers. Beginning as a staff photographer for the newly founded Shūkan Shinchō magazine in 1956, Kawada embarked on a career that would span more than sixty years and continues to produce critically acclaimed series to this day. His work includes numerous masterpieces in the history of photography, including The Map (1965), a complex and highly metaphorical series that examines Japan’s collective postwar memory, and the apocalyptic The Last Cosmology series, which combines cataclysmic weather phenomena with terrestrial events.

         Kawada began working with digital photography in the late 1990s, producing several bodies of work on the modern city, beginning with Car Maniac (1998) and continuing with Invisible City (2006), 2011–phenomena (2012) and Last Things (2017). His work is included in the collections of numerous museums around the world.

         Inspired by Francisco de Goya’s late 18^th-century series of prints criticizing Spanish society, Kikuji Kawada first used the title Los Caprichos for photographs published in a 1972 issue of Camera Mainichi and continued the series throughout various Japanese photography magazines in the following years. The first exhibition of Los Caprichos was held at Photo Gallery International (now PGI) in Tokyo in 1986. In 1998, the series was included in Kawada’s photobook The Globe Theater, along with The Last Cosmology and Car Maniac, the other two series of his Catastrophe Trilogy.

         In 2017, Kawada launched an Instagram account where he continues to publish his photographs. Since 2018, he has been exhibiting his new work as part of the Los Caprichos series, from Los Caprichos-Instagraphy-2017 in 2018 to Los Caprichos – Near Far in 2022, and now Los Caprichos – Demon of Tomorrow. Concurrent with this exhibition at PGI, the Kyotographie International Photography Festival 2024 will present a retrospective exhibition tracing Kawada’s work from The Map in 1965 to the World’s End exhibition in 2010.

         Los Caprichos – Demon of Tomorrow features urban snapshots and photographs of clouds and the moon, selected from Kawada’s ongoing body of Instagram work.

Since the publication of his debut book The Map in 1965, Kawada has remained highly perceptive to changing social climates, resulting in works that capture the sense of unease and suspense that permeates the world after events such as the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami, or the recent Corona pandemic. Echoing Goya’s masterpiece The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, Kawada’s Demon of Tomorrow depicts the world through motifs such as the ever-changing shapes of clouds or the moon shining brightly in the darkness of numbed consciences. Scenes shot through a car window, a technique that has appeared in many of Kawada’s series since Car Maniac, here haunt the viewer with even more relentlessness.

In Demon of Tomorrow, Kikuji Kawada once again uses his unique sensibility to discover the logic of our age, processing time and space from his own perspective. How will his vision synchronize with the audience’s world?

         The exhibition features approximately 40 archive pigment prints.

Los Caprichos , Demon of Tomorrow

My “Caprichos” series has been drifting through synchronicities and coincidences in search of new meanings. Forever unfinished, its chaos continues, chained to the demon of tomorrow.

The clouds, the moon, the city are my inescapable companions. When Galileo Galilei pointed his telescope at the night sky over Florence he was driven by a curiosity for new science and undiscovered memories. What emerges now, with the moon too close and the clouds in flux, is the occasional shadow of the demon.

One afternoon, the golden moon covered the circle of the sun. The clouds raged, and unseen memories emerged from the city veiled in blue and black.

Kikuji Kawada

[INFORMATION]

KYOTOGRAPHIE  2024

Kikuji Kawada Visions of the Invisible

April 13 – May 12, 2024

Supported by SIGMA

Kyoto City KYOCERA Museum of Art, Main Building, South Wing 2F

Kikuji Kawada

Born in Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan in 1933. Kawada co-founded the VIVO(1959-1961) photographic collective in 1959. He was one of the fifteen artists selected for the “New Japanese Photography” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1974.

Selected recent one-person exhibition: Theatrum Mundi (Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photograph, Tokyo, 2003), The Map 1960-1965 (PGI, 2004), The Last Cosmology  (Michael Hoppen Gallery, London, 2014), 100 Illusions (Canon Gallery S, 2018), Shadow in the Shadow (PGI, 2019), Los Caprichos (L. Parker Stephenson Photographs, NY, 2020), Le Rouge et le Noir (RICHO Imaging Square Tokyo, 2020), Endless Map (PGI, 2021), Chizu/The Map (The Third Gallery Aya, Osaka, 2022), Los Caprichos, Near Far (PGI, 2022), For Vortex (PURPLE, 2022), Los Caprichos, Near Far (Comminucation Gallery Fugensha, 2023) and numerous group exhibitions.