Yoshinori Marui

Unexpected Memories

Feb 5 - Mar 15, 2025
PGI

Yoshinori Marui

Unexpected Memories

Feb 5 - Mar 15, 2025
PGI

  • ©Yoshinori Marui

  • ©Yoshinori Marui

  • ©Yoshinori Marui

  • ©Yoshinori Marui

  • ©Yoshinori Marui

  • ©Yoshinori Marui

  • ©Yoshinori Marui

PGI is delighted to present its fifth solo exhibition of works by Japanese photographer Yoshinori Marui, opening February 5 and running through March 15, 2025. The exhibition consists of approximately 40 photographs from Marui’s new series Unexpected Memories.

      Yoshinori Marui began taking photographs while studying design at the Tokyo University of the Arts. In his early works, such as The Map (2003) and Along the Coastline (2008), Marui regarded objects and situations of everyday life as opportunities to go beyond perceptible reality and expand his imagination. With Collecting Light (2011), Marui focused on the theme of light itself, pushing his imaginative boundaries of reality through an examination of the object and its photographed image. He expanded on this approach in his subsequent series Point-flash (2016) and Apparition (2020).

      Marui’s new series Unexpected Memories, which forms the basis of PGI’s exhibition, is an allegorical work about the inexhaustible nature of the world, in which Marui examines the small discrepancies between truth and the memories evoked by photographs. Taken after the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, his photographs delve into the complex nature of the things that surround us in everyday life, and approach the ambiguities inherent in them: death and life, darkness and light, beauty and ugliness, urban and rural, artifice and nature, seriousness and play, aging and death.

 

 

Unexpected Memories

 

The other day, as I was looking through the photos on my phone, I suddenly began to see them as somewhat metaphorical. Each photograph of an object, event, or person is a visual splinter of reality. But in the same way, my everyday memories—the warmth of my daughter’s hand in mine, for example, or a comment I read online—are likewise little fragments of the world as I perceived it.

          Sometimes, when I look at other people’s photos, or at photos of mine that I’d forgotten, I discover something I hadn’t noticed before, or I see a whole new side to someone I know. I believe this is an experience shared by many. If memories, like photographs, are fragments of the world, then similar unexpected discoveries—capable of changing the way we see ourselves or our reality—will be waiting for us in memories, whether they’re other people’s or those we’ve forgotten.

 

The photographs in this series are like memories for me. They were taken over several years, either by chance or impulse. For some, I can’t remember why I took them; for others, I’m not even sure it was me who took them (a few seem to be my daughter’s).

          For me, revisiting photographs is akin to a small adventure, like taking a different route on the way home, or wandering through an arcade I haven’t been to in a while.

Whether I actually find something new doesn’t really matter. What is important is to remind myself that even now, somewhere right in front of me, the world continues to harbor unexpected fragments and possibilities.

 

Yoshinori Marui, November 2024

 

 

 

English translation by Robert Zetzsche

Yoshinori Marui

Born in Osaka, Japan, 1973.

Graduated from the Department of Design, Faculty of Fine Arts, Tokyo National University of the Arts, 1996. Completed research course studies, Tokyo College of Photography, 1997. Currently, a professor at the Department of Photography, Faculty of Arts, Tokyo Polytechnic University.

Since his first works in the early 2000s, Yoshinori Marui has produced numerous series that approach philosophical themes through photography.

In his 2003 series The Map, Marui explored the question of anonymity in landscapes. In Along the Coastline (2008), he investigated the layers of meaning that human history imbues into the geography of a region. His subsequent three series, Collecting Light (2011), Point Flash (2016), and Apparition(2020), focused on the essential beauty that emerges from photography and light. The common thread throughout his work is the idea that “the world becomes clearer through observation and photography, but certain things are also unconsciously lost through these acts.”

Selected solo exhibitions: Apparition, PGI (Tokyo, 2020), Point-flash, PGI (Tokyo, 2016), Collecting Light, Photo Gallery International [P.G.I.] (Tokyo 2011), Along the Coastline-from Cape Kyan to Mabuni, Okinawa, P.G.I. (Tokyo 2008), Okinawa, Exhibit Live & Moris (Tokyo, 2005)

Selected group exhibition: Okinawa Prismed 1872-2008, the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (Tokyo, 2008).