28 April
– 25 June 2005
Private
View Wednesday 27 April 2005
f a projects
is pleased to announce the second exhibition at the gallery of the work
of the acclaimed Japanese photographer Izima Kaoru. This exhibition
will feature the new series of works: Koike Eiko wears Gianni Versace.
Since 1993
Izima Kaoru has been engaged on the photographic project: Sitai no aru
hukei (Landscapes with a Corpse). In making these works he invites models
and actresses to reveal to him their fantasy of a perfect death, a fantasy
which he then brings to realisation. The resulting photo-projects are
filmic in structure: they exist as a sequence of images, normally four
or five, beginning with a long shot, and ending with a close up. Their
titles acknowledge the conventions of fashion photography from which
the work springs – Kaoru’s own profession before making
the crossover to contemporary art, and they draw heavily on the structures
of subjectivity, ideals of beauty and suggestions of narrative of that
medium. But Kaoru also has a wider subject. His work takes on Japanese
and Western preoccupations with death and the taboos that surround it,
and operates at the point of the meeting of beauty and horror, which
has such rich currency in both Western and Oriental cultures.
“Dead,
the models in Izima Kaoru’s images fantasise both mode and moment
of dispatch, order the high fashion appropriate to such violent elimination.
Photographed, they rise, wash off the synthetic gore, the mud and sand,
and live; never again so perfect as in the dream of their destruction.”
Chris
Townsend, Rapture: Art’s Seduction by Fashion since 1970, Thames
and Hudson, 2003
Izima Kaoru
lives and works in Tokyo, where he founded the magazine ZYAPPU in 1994.
Recent exhibitions include von Lintel Gallery, New York (2004), Casino
de Luxembourg (2003), True Fictions, Stadtische Galerie Erlangen, Rapture:
Arts Seduction by Fashion, Barbican Centre, London (2002) and Constructed
Realities, Grand Rapids Art Museum (2002). His work is represented in
the collection of the Musée d’Art Modèrne Grand
Duc Jean, Luxembourg, and major private collections internationally.
