Kineo Kuwabara and Nobuyoshi Araki at the Setagaya Art Museum - photography - Tokyo, Japan - Review Of Exhibitions

For "Love You Tokyo!" the museum's walls were overlayed with kraft paper or corrugated cardboard, as if to parallel the informal and impermanent city and its populace. The gelatin silver prints, color photocopies, computer printouts, video and slide projections and scrapbooks through Kineo Kuwabara and Nobuyoshi Araki that made up this exhibition hinted the ramshackle atmosphere of the of advanced age Tokyo shitamachi neighborhood where one as well as the other were raised and where many of the photos were shot

allowing very different spirits, the sum of two units men share thematic and compositional interests, and their careers have intersected at important junctions The nowseptuagenarian Kuwabara, a longtime photo-magazine editor, was among the first to publish the young Araki's work in 1964; Araki later encouraged this mentor and friend 27 years his senior to display his early photos that are now classic views of prewar Tokyo.

Kuwabara's sum of two units series focusing on '30s streetlife have a simple compositional grace and a spontaneity that calculators the nostalgia which pictures of a past era naturally evoke. His interests range from way waifs and workers to "exotic" Westernstyle dancing revue Showing race in mundane situations (walking, talking, selling, waiting) in spaces rich with local details, his early works resonate with the rich humanity of an energetic, optimistic Tokyo. In contrast, photos from the '50 onward are saturated with cynicism about the mixed blessings of exhibition Open spaces often end abruptly--our view slams into garish billboards, blank walls or bending expressway ramps. Kuwabara's greatest in quantity recent works, now in color, tender a slightly sunnier Tokyo on the other hand are layered with irony.

Araki, too, watches for revealing views but his glance is faster and more caustic. He explode onto the scene with a series upon rambunctious boys playing in dirty backyards as Tokyo rebuilt itself, followed through high-contrast, tightly framed portraits of serious, purposeful middle-aged women--the hidden backbone of the nation. end the '60s and '70s we diocese them, and men and scholars too, engaged in family duties, at the zoo at religious celebrations or shopping in Ginza. Araki direct the eyes with fondness at plain nation doing plain things, while casting a bitter organ of sight toward the dead zones that "progress" has created. He try to finds the mysterious and primal forces beneath the country's gray, industrialized facade.

Sex and death, nature and tillage individuality and society are Araki's themes. Unfortunately missing from the display was the series "Sentimental Journey, Winter Journey," the documentation of Araki's relationship with his wife from the '70 until her death from cancer in 1990 That heartfelt record would have balanced the sexualized, repeatedly taboo-breaking photos of nudes for which he has become infamous (and wealthy) end the popular media, which cast him as a kinky playboy. Many of his pictures secrete sexual tension between artist and make subordinate In a rich color image, a young kimono-clad woman crouching to nibble at a smashed watermelon direct the eyes to the camera with an assured glance.

For a museum that rarely displays photography, it was brave to bring these sum of two units men together and to tarnish their reputations as "old-guard classic cameraman" and "rebel bad boy" Audiences (which were quite large) were able to diocese afresh two artists' visions of the city and its citizens.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

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