Born in Tokyo, Japan in 1979. Graduated with a BFA in painting from Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music in 2003, and was awarded the University's Purchase Prize (Graduation Exhibition). In the same year she received the university's Ohashi Memorial Prize and was selected for a Holbein Scholarship. She has also recently received a scholarship in the Agency for Cultural Affairs’ Program of Overseas Study for Upcoming Artists and is planning to reside in Vienna. In 2008 she won the Namura Priza and in 2010 The Gotoh Memorial Prize Foudation Newcomer’s prize of art. Major solo exhibitions include “It is as it is” at ShugoArts 2009 and ’Half in Gray’ at void + 2009. Taguchi gained significant attention from the group exhibitions, 'Chaosmos '05 -Unreal Reality’, shown at the Sakura City Museum of Art, 2005, ’Trace Elements’ at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery 2008 and The Performance Space, Sydney 2008, ’ somewhere between me and this world Japanese contemporary photography’ at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography 2012 and ’sleeping Beauty’, Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Hiroshima 2014. Kazuna Taguchi has attracted international attention for her ability to blur the border between photography and painting. Her work involves creating a monochrome acrylic painting that is then photographed to produce a finished image in what has been described as "an alchemy-like manner that manipulates painting and photography", (Kyoji Maeda, 17 Feb, 2006, evening edition, Yomiuri Shimbun). The result ensures a peculiar other-worldliness that is central to the attraction of Taguchi's work.
At this years Photo London, Christophe Guye Galerie juxtaposes European with Asian artists who, in different approaches and unique techniques, scrutinize humanity and their environment and straddle the line between photography and art.
While photography is often seen as the amplification of something, Stephen Gill (*1971, Great Britain) tries the opposite. He wants to quieten things and not enhancing them. This tension stimulates the viewer to think of his or her own story. Ina Jang (*1982, South Korea) creates work with a playful and poetic spirit. Constructive and deconstructive alike her work is physical, gentle, and humorous, introducing new meanings to familiar objects while exploring a collapse of dimensions in photography. Rinko Kawauchi (*1972, Japan) explores the extraordinary in the everyday life, drawn to t...
Using existing images such as magazine, newspaper and found photo clippings as her motif, Kazuna Taguchi paints anonymous, imaginary women and still lifes with astonishing realism. She then photographs the resulting acrylic painting and, after a patient operation in the darkroom, produces a photograph which will be shown as the final work. Standing in front of her skilfully finished photographic print, a viewer will feel the strange yet irresistible sense of reality in the image. Her works veil the marks of her brushwork, and their photographic aura makes some of the portraits feel like pages from a magazine fashion spread. But in another sense, the ambiguity of their surface – is it a photo or not? is it canvas or paper? – positions Kazuna Taguchi as an artist who is not primarily satisfied with obvious read...
Since the 1990s, after half a century of chasing after the West in the post-war period, Japan began to globally disseminate its own cultural expression. Japan’s unique cultural output has been particularly noteworthy in architecture, animation, comic and fashion. Japanese photography too has become established as a unique cultural product.
The Western art world has passionately embraced the works of Nobuyoshi Araki and Daido Moriyama since the early 1990s. Soon after, younger star photographers, such as HIROMIX, who is intimately connected to Tokyo’s subculture, also gained wide recognition. In the 2000s, a number of photographers including Rinko Kawauchi, Tomoko Sawada and Lieko Shiga received strong acclaim one after another. On the other hand, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Yasumasa Morimura, whose work are u...