ARTISTS

Gozo Yoshimasu, Tenmei Kano, Rui Araki, Daido Moriyama, Nobuyoshi Araki, Kishin Shinoyama, Eikoh Hosoe, Takashi Homma, Sarah Moon, Jeanloup Sieff, Larry Clark, Robert Frank, William Klein, Elliott Erwitt, Jack Pierson, and others

INFORMATION

The Poetics of Vision

– Frames of Time –

Dates: December 12 (Fri) – 26 (Fri), 2025

Venue: Atsuhiko Suematsu Gallery

(9-5-12 Akasaka, Minato-ku, Tokyo B1C)

Hours: 11:00 – 18:00

Open daily during the exhibition period Atsuhiko Suematsu Gallery (Akasaka, Tokyo) is pleased to present Poetics of Vision – Frames of Time –, a group exhibition centered on photographic works.

The exhibition brings together works by a diverse range of artists, with a particular focus on Gozo Yoshimasu (b. 1939), Tenmei Kano (b. 1942), and Lui Araki (b. 1977).

Widely recognized as one of Japan’s leading contemporary poets, Gozo Yoshimasu has also achieved international acclaim across a broad spectrum of creative practices, including film, installation, and visual art. Since the 1990s, photography has occupied an important place within his artistic practice. His photographic works have been featured in major exhibitions such as Gozo Yoshimasu: The Whole Poet – Voice Nomad (2016, The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo) and At the Edge of Hearing: Poet Gozo Yoshimasu (2018, The Shoto Museum of Art). For this exhibition, we present a series of intimate works created between 1999 and 2000, in which words are layered onto multiple-exposure photographs. First exhibited in 2000 under the title The Garden of Palimpsests, these works foreshadow the direction that Yoshimasu’s photographic practice would subsequently take.

Photographer Tenmei Kano, renowned for his distinctive portraits, graduated from Nagoya Municipal Technical High School before beginning his career in 1962 as an assistant to photographer Takashi Kijima. The following year, he established himself as an independent freelance photographer and went on to publish numerous influential photobooks. This exhibition features New York 1969, a series photographed during a private stay in New York. Through the eyes of a twenty-seven-year-old artist confronting the city alone, Kano captured a vision of New York that embodies both vitality and glamour, resulting in a body of work that remains strikingly expressive today.

Lui Araki has worked internationally since the late 1990s, including as a member of the renowned New York skateboard company ZOO YORK. Alongside his activities in the global skateboarding scene, Araki has consistently pursued photography, carrying a film camera throughout his daily travels and documenting people and landscapes before producing prints using traditional darkroom techniques in his home studio. This exhibition presents a selection of prints, including both recent works and key photographs taken in Hong Kong, one of the locations that has played a significant role in his artistic development.

Bringing together three artists who have each helped shape their respective fields, the exhibition introduces perspectives forged through encounters with places around the world. Complementing their works are vintage and contemporary photographic prints by Japanese and international photographers, spanning the period from the 1950s through the 2000s.