Paris Photo 2025

Yumiko Chiba Associates | Booth C47
Shin YANAGISAWA
Kazuyo KINOSHITA
Jiro TAKAMATSU
Shiho YOSHIDA
Kenryou GU
Hanako MURAKAMI

Yumiko Chiba Associates is delighted to present a group show of the prominent contemporary artists from our programme.

The origins of photography date back to ancient China and Greece. In the 4th century BC, the pinhole effect was already known but in the 16th century, camera obscura were invented; in the early 19th century, the Niépce brothers succeeded in taking photographs using bitumen as the photosensitive material, and later, Daguerre introduced the “the Daguerreotype”, using a sheet of silver-plated copper as the photosensitive material.

Hanako Murakami (1984– ), who has been working with the research of the Niépce brothers using the same techniques as at the time, says: “Achievements made by Niépce can certainly be called the origin of photography, but following this process goes beyond simply tracing back the history of the photographic medium, and more broadly, it illuminates the motivation to ’hold the scene in front of us forever", which we can all experience, and the wonder of “seeing” itself.
Murakami lives and works in Paris. Her works are featured in prominent collections including Centre national des arts plastiques, Paris, France; Musée Nicéphore Niépce, Chalon-sur-Saône, France; frac Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand, France.

Shiho Yoshida (1992– ) has been creating photographic works that go back and forth between analogue and digital, and has expressed landscapes that do not actually exist, which can only be created by merging both processes, in installations that use the entire space. For Paris Photo, Yoshida will curate a wall, juxtaposing the works by leading conceptual artist Jiro Takamatsu (1936-1998) and one of important post-war female artists Kazuyo Kinoshita (1939-1994) with Yoshida’s own new works.
Yoshida received the 46th Kimura Ihei Award in 2022. Her works are included in major collections in Japan, including Tokyo Photographic Art Museum; Chiba City Museum of Art.

Kenryou Gu (1994– ) says: “What's quite important in my production is that I'm definitely going to the place, and it's a production with a tremendous amount of travel distance.”
In this day and age, we are bombarded with a vast amount of photos and information on the internet. It is not the case that we move around to see different landscapes as in the past, but on the contrary, we receive more images and information when we don't move around. The way in which photographers and artists working in photography face this situation and the stance and position from which they produce their work is an important issue for Gu to consider the definition of photography.
Gu’s works are included in the collection of M+, Hong Kong, as well as major corporate collections including UNIVERSAL MUSIC JAPAN; Mitsubishi Estate Co.,Ltd.; NTT Communications Corporation.

“Épreuves de la Matière” the exhibition held at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (October 2024 - February 2025), was about the transformative capacity of photographic material. The meaning of material varies from subject, texture, emulsion, support and digital image, and the meaning of transformation varies from photographic technique, print, chemical experimentation, hybrid, passage of time and disappearance. However what is there is the touch of the beginning of photography and the artist's fundamental questioning of “seeing” itself.

Shin Yanagisawa (1936–2008), an unprolific photographer with few solo exhibitions or photo books, has also asked these questions as he has captured changing urban landscapes on film, but has also used light and shadow to express moments that are reality, but which we cannot capture with our retinas.

Together with the “photographs” Yanagisawa left behind with his camera and print in the age of film, Yoshida and Gu, who are digital natives, and Murakami, who stands at the boundary between the two and asks what the definition and origin of “photography” – for Paris Photo 2025, Yumiko Chiba Associates attempts to re-examine what is visible/ invisible and explore the boundaries between the two.

For sales enquiries and further details please contact: info@ycassociates.co.jp

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