Yasuhiro Ogawa is considered one of the new strong voices in Japanese photography. Through his unique perspectives and emotional depth, Yasuhiro Ogawa captures the beauty and mystery of travel and creates images that are both timeless and striking. His work retells the classic motifs and contemplative attitude of Japanese landscape photography.

The Buchkunst Berlin gallery will present a selection of these photographs for the first time in Berlin, Germany, from September 7, 2024. At the opening, the curator and lecturer in photography, Thomas Gust, will talk with Yasuhiro Ogawa about his work. Afterwards, the photographer will sign his books.

Landscapes appear as if on a canvas, suffusing the fogged-up windows of a train, darkness, and light bordering on each other. Snow falls on soft, darkened colors. The places in Yasuhiro Ogawa’s pictures seem enchanted.

For his current series, Into the Silence, the focus of the exhibition, Ogawa, followed in the footsteps of the haiku poet Matsuo Bashō, who traveled through northern Japan in the 17th century. The collection of poems that emerged from this journey, now known under the title Oku no Hosomichi (The Narrow Road to the Deep North), combines the complex and multi-layered form of expression of the haiku with descriptions of nature in a largely unknown territory (the Japanese settlement of Hokkaidō largely only took place in the 19th century), thereby creating an important national founding myth for Japan. Ogawa followed Bashō’s route for ten years and created color photographs that transformed the environment into dream landscapes. This transformation of the place, however, always remains in the status of the binding nature of the real moment. The strong colors create abstract separations in the image compositions, which makes the images appear fragile and open. Just as the mood of a haiku lingers when we read it, we enter into Yasuhiro Ogawa‘s auratic image spaces and lose ourselves in them.

Another influence is Japanese woodcuts, which were created in the mid-18th century and whose traditions have continued uninterrupted in Japan. The wave of Japonism at the end of the 19th century made color prints popular in Europe. The influence of Japanese woodcuts on artists of classical modernism, who consistently adopted essential elements in their painting techniques, is documented by the collections and copies of prints by artists such as Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, and Edvard Munch. Ogawa’s color photographs, with their emanating silence, intense and abstract colors, and the presence of nature and natural events, can also be understood in this tradition.

The slowed-down and contemplative attitude of the images speaks of the freedom of being on the move and the simplicity of life. Ogawa’s photographs reinforce our inner longing for the original experience of nature outside of our self-created, increasingly artificial life structures.

At the age of 23, Ogawa discovered the photographs of Sebastião Salgado and began to take photographs himself. He spent years traveling through Asia, Africa and Central Asia to take his pictures.

In the series The Dreaming in 2019, he looks back and brings together a selection of the black and white photographs from this quarter-century-long search. In these images, Ogawa mixes blurs, darkness, and coarse grain with a lyrical attitude and harmonious elements. The balance of this connection and the character of the absence of these places create an intensified emotional viewing experience. The photographer gained international fame with the publication of the same book.

The artist lives and works in Tokyo. He is one of the most important contemporary photographers in Japan and has, among other awards, received the Taiyo Award and the Newcomer Award from the Photographic Society of Japan for his images.

BUCHKUNST BERLIN
Yasuhiro Ogawa – Into the Silence & The Dreaming

Opening: 7. September 2024, 18-22
Greeting: Curatorial tour with Thomas Gust and Yasuhiro Ogawa
Duration: 7. September – 16. November 2024
Location: Gallery Buchkunst Berlin, Oranienburger Strasse 27, 10117 Berlin
Opening hours: Thursday-Saturday, 2-6 p.m.

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