Masafumi Sanai – Shizuoka-shi

amanaTIGP is pleased to present Masafumi Sanai’s solo exhibition “Shizuoka-shi”. Marking the artist’s first solo show at the gallery, the exhibition features a selection of around 15 works photographed in and around Shizuoka City from the 1990s to 2023. This show is restructured from the eponymous exhibition held at the Shizuoka City Museum of Art from July to August this year.

Sanai, who won the New Cosmos of Photography Excellence Award in 1995 and made his debut in 1997 with the much-acclaimed photo book “Alive”, has garnered attention for his enigmatic photographs that leave viewers to search for their own meaning, and is highly regarded as one of the leading photographers of the 1990s.

Despite clearly capturing scenes commonly observed within everyday life, such as a corner of a room, a roadside guardrail, a car, and a meal, Sanai’s works always harbor feelings of ambiguity and elusiveness. He broke new ground in the realm of snapshot photography by capturing landscapes that were neither lyrical nor epic, and deviated from the mainstream context of snapshots as mental landscapes or as means of social and historical documentation.

“There’s a sensation within me to take a photograph, and I hold my camera up to capture that sensation, yet I don’t take the photograph then and there. Instead, it is when I move or they move, and the presence is about to disappear, that I press the shutter.” (Masafumi Sanai, August 2023)

Sanai has photographed his hometown of Shizuoka City and the surrounding area intermittently in a consistent style for more than 20 years, but to date had never presented any of these images as work. The photographs, which had been stored in their negative form over an extended period, are exhibited on this occasion along with new works in correspondence to the exhibition at Shizuoka City Museum of Art. The artist mentions that the sheer “heaviness” of photographing in his hometown was the very reason why he did not show the works he had shot in Shizuoka over the years until now in 2023.

Masafumi Sanai was born in Shizuoka City, Shizuoka Prefecture in 1968.

Gallery hours Tue-Sat 12 – 7 pm, closed on Sun, Mon and National Holidays

Exhibition Duration 22.09. – 28.10.2023

www.takaishiigallery.com

Location:
amanaTIGP
AXIS building 2F, 5-17-1 Roppongi, Minato-ku
106-0032 Tokyo
Japan