The Wondrous Stillness of Rinko Kawauchi

[Mulboyne]

FT.com: The ordinary made extraordinary (link will expire so rest of article on next post)
In press interviews last July, the British photo-grapher Martin Parr described the Japanese photography scene as currently the most important and dynamic in the world. At the time Parr was guest director of the 2004 Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie festival in Arles, where he introduced Rinko Kawauchi to a European public. Eight months later, the Fondation Cartier in Paris is holding an exhibition of exquisite new works by Kawauchi, the brightest star of the young generation of Japanese artists. Kawauchi is the third Japanese photographer (after Daido Moriyama and Hiroshi Sujimoto) that it has spotlighted in the past 18 months...more...

[Mulboyne]

(continued)

In Japan, a photographer's success is not measured in terms of exhibitions but by the number of books he or she has published. At 33, Rinko Kawauchi already has seven books to her credit, of which three were immense bestsellers in Japan and earned her the Kimura Ihei award in 2001.

The Paris exhibition presents photographs from her three most recent publications, Aila, The Eyes, The Ears, and Cui Cui.

Kawauchi depicts the most ordinary details of reality and transforms them, through light and colour, into an emotion-filled celebration of life. Using subtle, translucent pastels, she captures the infinitely small, delicate and fragile, and offers an unblinking invitation to contemplate the ephemeral beauty of all forms of existence. In the hands of most artists, these themes would be potentially saccharine. Kawauchi manages to circumvent the danger, both in the exhibition and her books, by carefully juxtaposing images, forging an intriguing visual dialogue between oppositions such as birth and death, the living and the mineral.

The juxtaposition of 73 untitled works from the Aila series, shown in the main display space, represents the myriad experiences of existence that bind all earthly things together. Kawauchi chose the word aila, Turkish for "family", to convey a universal perception of relatedness. Placed side by side is an aerial view of the silvery grey surface of a volcano in Hawaii and a photograph showing the silvery-grey texture of a crow's feathers. A fat-cheeked, open-mouthed baby looks upwards in one photograph and seems to be staring at the lightning bolt that flashes across the night sky in the photo just after it.

One wall presents a mosaic of some 20 small-format photographs: a newborn baby; a lightly poised butterfly; slaughtered chickens; an animal being born; waterfalls in a forest; a fish eye; raindrops against a turquoise sky. The images bounce off each other, like musical notes composing a visual melody.

Cui Cui, a slide show consisting of 232 photographs that Kawauchi took of her family between 1992 and 2005, is shown in an adjacent room. The title, which comes from the sound used in French to describe the cry of a sparrow, evokes the multitude of small events in the life of a family. Being a non-Japanese sound, it once again draws on a universal perception of relatedness: a grandfather falls ill, a baby is born, a family gathers for a meal, flowers blossom.

The third part of the exhibition is shown in a small cubic space and features 30 small prints and contact sheets, pinned unframed on the wall, from the series The Eyes, the Ears. An ode to the five senses, it is a deliberately intimate display that includes a rainbow forming and fading, the delicate profile of a woman's eye, a spider web glistening with dew drops on a bush, a coffee pot on a burner.

It is perhaps the wondrous stillness of Kawauchi's photographs that makes them so charged with emotion. Rather than describing the transitory beauty of the world, she lets the world speak for itself - for the pleasure of those willing to look and listen. 'Rinko Kawauchi', Fondation Cartier, Paris, to June 5. Tel +33 1 42 18 56 50. Then to Florence and Amsterdam