Contemporary Japanese photography at MOMA in Tbilisi

The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in Tbilisi, Georgia, is holding an exhibition of Contemporary Japanese Photography from 16-30 September 2016 as part of the Tbilisi Photo Festival.

Eleven Japanese photographers have assembled their works in MOMA : Arata Dodo, Aya Fujioka, Miho Kajioka, Hajime Kimura, Eriko Koga, Kazuma Obara, Naoyuki Ogino, Koji Onaka, Chieko Shiraishi, Motohiro Takeda, and Yu Yamauchi.

Koji Onaka's Lucky Cat exhibition shows shoes on people's doorsteps and home life situations.

Yu Yamauchi’s The Hermit – The Man Living Above Clouds is a collection of photographs about a man who lives in a hut on Mt Fuji, with its peak at approximately 3,000 metres above sea level. The hut has been there for about 600 years. He asks: What does the man watch for 40 years while he lives there? The answer is in the photos – infinite space above the clouds, the slight lights of Tokyo below, and the changing weather. Yamauchi lived with the man for 600 days.

Naoyuki Ogino’s Fount of Geiko is about the Geisha in Kyoto. He was able to gain permission to enter the Geiko society in the course of 18 years – an exclusively female society with outsiders not allowed to witness their everyday life. Its members, of only a few hundred people, have their own dialect – ‘very soft and elegant tones with some unique words.’ When a new female enters the society, at around 16 years of age, she learns how to wear the kimono, speak the dialect, and transform from apprentice to a fully fledged Geiko. Ogino tries to ‘feel and photograph the moment of transformation that occurs even without them knowing it.’

Hajime Kimura presented Man and Dog and Family Album. Kimura was born in 1982 and lives in a small town 30 kilometres from Tokyo. He has no memory of his grandparents because they died when he was about three years old, and his mother died when he was 16. Since then he drifted away from his family. He renewed interest in his family in 2011 when he heard that his father was dying of cancer. He visited his father. His father had a dog, Kuro, which means black. Kimura found some old photographs, which revealed information about his family. In his exhibition he makes ‘post histories’ of his family in an attempt to understand where he came from.

Arata Dodo’s exhibition is Iwashima Ward about the island of Iwashima (population 500, which used to have 5,000). From Tokyo Dodo visits the island to attend the Kanmai festival, which takes place every four years on the western side called the Seto Island Sea. Whenever he visits the island he thinks: Is that where I should be living? He photographs the fishermen and the festival. The Kaminoseki nuclear power plant is planned for construction near Kanmai, and ‘the ageing islanders are confused by the anti-nuclear power movement in Japan.’

Kazuma Obara’s exhibiton is Exposure. The series of photographs represent the past 30 years of the life of an ‘invisible’ female who was affected by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster on 26 April 1986. Obara spent a year with the woman, from January 2015 to January 2016. Mariya was born five months after the disaster, in Kiev, 100 kilometres south of Chernobyl. She was a sickly child, and at the age of 19, she noticed symptoms such as severe fatigue, insomnia and panic attacks. Her hair started to fall out and her nails flaked. She had thyroid gland surgery at 24. Today she takes up to 20 pills a day to maintain her hormone balance. Her disease and disability are invisible and people cannot understand her life. Obara tries to capture, through photography, Mariya’s everyday life. All of the photographs use old Ukrainian colour negative films (expiration date 1991-1992) found in the abandoned city of Pripyat 5 kilometres from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. All the films were exposed for 2-4 minutes and processed using black/white liquid, which produced abstract images – the film itself was exposed to radiation.

Miho Kajioka called his exhibition And, Where did the Peacocks go? After the Fukushima nuclear plant accident on 11 March 2011 Kajioka noticed a blog about the peacocks that were left inside the evacuation zone (within the 20 kilometre limit of the nuclear plant). Kajioka imagined the beautiful birds in the disaster zone. The photographer says ‘it is not my intention to introduce a pessimistic note or romanticize tragedy. There have been always problems, and beautiful things have always remained beautiful.’

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).