Ocula Conversation Pierre Huyghe: The Artist as Director Pierre Huyghe is a producer of spectacular and memorable enigmas, with works that function more like mirages than as objects. Abyssal Plain (2015–ongoing), his contribution to the 2015 Istanbul Biennial, curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, was installed on the seabed of the Marmara Sea, some 20 metres below the surface of the water and close to...
Ocula Report MoMA Expansion: Once the Modern, Always the Modern 29 Nov 2019 : Mohammad Salemy for Ocula In the early decades of its existence, New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), founded in 1929, transformed from a philanthropic project modestly housed in a few rooms of the Heckscher Building on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 57th Street, to an alleged operating node in the United States' cultural struggle during the cold war, and one of the...
Ocula Insight | Video Hans Hartung and Art Informel at Mazzoleni London (1 October 2019-18 January 2020) presents key works by the French-German painter while highlighting his connection with artists active in Paris during the 50s and 60s. In this video, writer and historian Alan Montgomery discusses Hartung's practice and its legacy.Born in Leipzig in 1904, Hans...
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 At Art Taipei, Galleries Adapt to Regional Politics 25 Oct 2019 : Sam Gaskin for Ocula In Taipei, the artwork that said most about the contemporary art market's fraught situation in East Asia was not at the 26th Art Taipei (18–21 October 2019), but across town at the Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab, a publicly funded art park established in Taiwan's former Air Force Command Headquarters in 2018.Chin Cheng-Te's Tender Soul – Cold-War...
Ocula Report Daido Moriyama: The Erotics of Photography 11 Oct 2019 : Tianyuan Deng for Ocula In a documentary video published by Tate Modern to accompany its exhibition William Klein + Daido Moriyama in 2013, Moriyama, one of the most influential avantgarde photographers to emerge out of postwar Japan, roams the urban streets of Shinjuku equipped with a compact digital camera. Dressed in a low-key black jacket, his gait is relaxed but...
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...
