TARO NASU is pleased to announce Taiji Matsue’s solo exhibition, entitled “gazetteer”.
Taiji Matsue
Born in 1963, Lives and works in Tokyo.
Graduated from the University of Tokyo in 1987, with a major in geology.
Won the Higashikawa New Photographer Award in 1996, the Kimura Ihee Photography Award in 2002, the Higashikawa Domestic Photographer Award in 2012, and The 25th Society of Photography Award in 2013.
Recent solo exhibitions include “JP-22” at the Vangi Sculpture Garden Museum (Shizuoka) in 2006 and “Surficial Survey” at the IZU PHOTO MUSEUM (Sizuoka) in 2012. Recent major group exhibitions include “Artist File 2011―NACT Annual Show of Contemporary Art” at the National Art Center Tokyo in 2011, “Aomori Earth” at Aomori Museum of Art in 2014, Sapporo International Art Festival 2014, “A Bird’s-eye View of the World” at Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art in 2015. He also participated a traveling exhibition “ Logical Emotions” in Switzerland, Poland and Germany in 2014-2015.
In this exhibition, Matsue presents his representative series “gazetteer” in this exhibition.
“gazetteer” is known as a series of B&W landscape photography, however, Matsue had also shot on color film at the same time. The reason why Matsue only developed B&W films in spite of photographing same objects in color, is it was hard to get the high quality images in color as he wanted in that era. For Matsue who has stated “Photography is technology and information”, the development of technology for color photographic printing is equal to spreading a range of his expressions. Since his first color photography project as well as photobook called “JP-22” was published in 2005, the majority of his medium has been shifted to color photography rather than B&W.
For this exhibition, Matsue presents both B&W and color photographs of the same objects from “gazetteer”. Some were photographed in the same time, others were taken few years after in the exactly same locations and objects. This playful structure of the exhibition suggests the relationship between B&W and color with time elements. His retrospective solo exhibition “TAIJI MATSUE gazetteer” at Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art starts from 8th December in 2018. He also has another show “TAIJI MATSUE JP-34” at GALLERY-SIGN Hiroshima in Hiroshima starting on the same day. The viewers can find Matsue’s achievements over 40 years.
