July 11, 2024
BEIJING – Late celebrated Japanese photographer Masahisa Fukase (1934-2012) is often associated with his obsessive portrayal of his wife, beloved muse Yoko Wanibe, and ravens, after Yoko divorced him.
The Three Shadows Photography Art Centre in Beijing is holding Private Scenes: Masahisa Fukase, the artist’s largest retrospective in Asia to date, chronicling Fukase’s four-decade-long career with 376 works.
Co-curated by Tomo Kosuga, co-founder and director of the Masahisa Fukase Archives, and Qi Yan, executive curator of Three Shadows, the Beijing exhibition features the artist’s iconic series of “Ravens” and “Yoko,” as well as “Private Scenes,” “Family,” “Games,” and “Walking Eye.”
Born to a family that ran a successful photo studio, Fukase was trained at the Nihon University College of Art’s Photography Department. He rose to fame in the 1960s and maintained a close friendship with renowned Japanese photographers such as Daido Moriyama and Nobuyoshi Araki, standing together under the international spotlight.
As one of the pioneers of “private photography,” Fukase weaved his own life experiences of love, loss, loneliness and depression into his artistic creation, with humor and sometimes borderline madness, according to the curators.
Throughout his creative life, his lens was always focused on those around him: his wife Yoko, his dying father, and his beloved cat Sasuke, resulting in personal and highly intimate images imbued with both comedy and moodiness. Toward the end of his working life before he went into a coma after a tragic fall in 1992, Fukase had turned the camera on himself and created a slew of expressive self-portraits.
The art center also announced that during the Fukase exhibition, an eponymous photo album of Masahisa Fukase will be published in collaboration with the Cultural Development Press Co Ltd in China. Compared to the English, French, and Japanese editions, the Chinese version newly includes the “Yoko” series, making it the most exhaustive compilation of Fukase’s classic photography to date, according to the publishers.
Private Scenes: Masahisa Fukase runs until September 8.
If you go:
10 am-6 pm, closed on Mondays. Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, 155 A Caochangdi, Chaoyang district, Beijing. 010-6432-2663