Brancolini Grimaldi Via dei Tre Orologi, 6/A 00197 Roma Italie
Brancolini Grimaldi is pleased to announce "The Park", an exhibition of black-and-white photographs from the 1970s by Japanese photographer Kohei Yoshiyuki. This will be Mr. Yoshiyuki's first solo exhibition in Italy.
For these photographs, taken in Tokyo's Shinjuku, Yoyogi, and Aoyama parks during the 1970s, Mr. Yoshiyuki used a 35mm camera, infrared film, and flash to document the people who gathered there at night for clandestine trysts, as well as the many spectators lurking in the bushes who watched-and sometimes participated in-these couplings. With their raw, snapshot-like quality, these images not only uncover the hidden sexual exploits of their subjects, both homosexual and heterosexual, but also provoke questions about our own attitudes towards surveillance and voyeurism.
Collectively, these photographs also serve as a chronicle of a Japan we rarely see; as Martin Parr writes in The Photobook: A History, Volume II, The Park is "a brilliant piece of social documentation, capturing perfectly the loneliness, sadness, and desperation that so often accompany sexual or human relationships in a big, hard metropolis like Tokyo."
The work was first presented in 1979 in Tokyo and quickly became a huge underground success. For that show the pictures were blown up to life size, the gallery lights were turned off, and each visitor was given a flashlight. Yoshiyuki wanted to reconstruct the darkness of the park. "I wanted people to look at the bodies an inch at a time," he has said. The prints were destroyed after the show, and the work disappeared almost completely until finally resurfacing again in an exhibition in New York in 2007.
Kohei Yoshiyuki was born in 1946 in Japan, where he currently lives and works. The series "The Park" has been shown internationally, including recently at the Berlin Biennial this past spring, and this fall at the Gwangju Biennale in Korea. His work is represented in many important public and private collections, including the MOMA, NY; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; and the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago. This is his first exhibition in Italy.