Ocula Conversation Sunjung Kim’s Real DMZ Project Interrogates the North and South Korea Divide Ongoing since 2012, the Real DMZ Project interrogates the demilitarised zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea through annual, research-based exhibitions that bring together the works of Korean and international artists. Sunjung Kim, the independent curator behind the project, conceived the idea of exploring the DMZ while curating Japanese artist...
Ocula Report Frieze Week Lowdown: London Shows to See 20 Sep 2019 : Tessa Moldan for Ocula London's galleries and museums are gearing up for a lively October, with Frieze London and Frieze Masters running between 3 and 6 October 2019 at Regent's Park, along with 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, taking place across the same dates at Somerset House; and the tenth anniversary of the Sunday Art Fair, showcasing new and emerging artists...
Ocula Insight | Video Mark Bradford’s Call for Unity at Shanghai’s Long Museum 16 August 2019 Mark Bradford walks through Mark Bradford: Los Angeles Mark Bradford: Los Angeles at the Long Museum West Bund in Shanghai (27 July–13 October 2019) is the artist's largest solo exhibition to date in China. In this video for Ocula, Bradford and Diana Nawi, curator of the show, walk through selected works that convey the artist's concerns with...
Daido Moriyama (b. 1938, Osaka, Japan) is amongst Japan’s most celebrated photographers, renowned for his radical approach to both medium and subject. Initially trained in graphic design, Moriyama moved to Tokyo in 1961 to pursue a career as a freelance photographer. There, he became the most prominent artist to emerge from the short lived yet profoundly influential Provoke movement, based around the experimental photography magazine of the same name. Moriyama’s bold, uncompromising images, with their grainy aesthetic and gritty subject matter embraced the subjective philosophy of Provoke, liberating photography from tradition and interrogating the very nature of the medium. His first major series, Japan: A Photo Theatre, was published as a photo book in 1968. It documented the vast urbanisation experienced by Tokyo, and more generally Japan, in the wake of the Second World War, recording a disintegration of traditional values and revealing the dark underbelly of city life. Influenced by the work of William Klein and Andy Warhol, as well as the writings of Jack Kerouac and the experimental theatre of Shūji Terayama, Moriyama in turn has extensively inspired subsequent generations of photographers with his discordant impressions of city life and chaotic vision of everyday existence.
Ocula Report Go East: The Gene & Brian Sherman Contemporary Asian Art Collection 5 Jun 2015 : Jane O’Sullivan for Ocula Yang Zhichao’s Chinese Bible is both unyieldingly monumental and humble. In the latest presentation of the work in Sydney, all 3,000 of the diaries he has collected from Beijing’s fleamarkets are placed in neat rows on a large, rectangular plinth. Dated from 1949 to 1999 they record 50 turbulent years in China’s...
Ocula Conversation Gene Sherman & Suhanya Raffel Collector and Curator When Australian collectors and philanthropists Gene and Brian Sherman moved from South Africa to Australia in 1976, Gene says they instantly recognised a “buzz about Asia” that they weren’t expecting.As an academic teaching French literature, the push towards Asian languages also put her out of a job. “I went into...
Related Press Daido Moriyama: An interview with Bree Zucker BOMB Magazine : 9 January 2017 Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama has garnered near-cultic fascination since his images began to infiltrate the American consciousness in the late 1990s. At that time, his work rode to prominence on the wave of discovery surrounding Japanese photography—especially for book enthusiasts, who championed the strangely beautiful amalgam of poetic...
Related Press Tokyo: photogenic to its very core The Japan Times : 14 December 2016 With Tokyo being the object of so many excellent photographers’ interest over the last 150 odd years, it’s entirely legitimate that the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum should be bringing it home. What’s on display in the first exhibition, displayed on the third floor, is a selection from the museum’s world-class permanent...
Related Press The urban chaos of Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama Art Radar Journal : 30 May 2016 Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris launched a major show of the Japanese photographer’s most recent work in February 2016. Charting some of Moriyama’s most significant oeuvre of the past decade, the exhibition brings to the fore the artist’s lesser-known colour photography as well as a new body of...
Related Press Photographers in Focus: Daido Moriyama Nowness : 12 April 2016 Arguably East Asia’s most famous street photographer, Daido Moriyama has gained an international cult following for his uncompromising, high-contrast black and white shots of Tokyo’s bustling streets. A new documentary from Italian director Andrea Cossu delves into the world of the master photographer’s often-overlooked color...
Related Video & Audio Daido Moriyama: The Mighty Power Nowness / 11 December 2012 : 20 December 2014 Acclaimed Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama's sensual approach to the urban landscape is revealed in this edifying short by the Hong Kong-based filmmaker Ringo Tang. Now in his 70s, Moriyama shot to fame when his grainy black-and-white images depicting a post-war Japan in flux won the country's New Artist Award in 1967 and has since had major...
