He is Japan’s greatest living photographer. Ansel Adams, Bill Brandt, Edward Weston inspired him ; Yukio Mishima himself asked him to capture his “masochistic and narcissistic universe” in the series Ordeal by Roses, in the early 60’s. Very early on in his career, Eikoh Hosoe broke the taboo surrounding the representation of the nude body in the Japanese pictorial tradition.
“I have always been haunted by the visual research on the nude and its architecture”, says Hosoe. “Beyond mere aesthetic and graphic considerations, I have tried to ask the question of identity and of the self, by describing the sensuous and tactile qualities of flesh, simply by probing parts of the body. I try to magnify nude bodies and to make them commune by representing abstract and unisex shapes.”
“Ukiyo-E Projections” pulls us into the erotic and tortured realm of butoh, the “danse of obscure bodies” born in the wake of Hiroshima. “Images of the floating world” – the “Ukiyo-E” of 18th century Japanese etchings dedicated to pleasure and beauty” – are projected, like giant tattoos, on the naked and white-washed bodies of dancers, for a last performance at the Asbesto Workshop, a mythical locus of Tokyo avant-gardes, just before its demolition. Eikoh Hosoe’s exhibition, his first in Paris since his retrospective at the Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris in 1982, marks his transition from black and white to colour, in a salute to the 21st century. It is also an ideal contemporary counterpoint, dark and elegiac, to the current “Images of the Floating World” exhibition in the Grand Palais, in one of the edgiest photographic galleries of the Parisian art scene.

D.B

Galerie Acte2 until November 5, 2004
41, rue d'Artois 75008 Paris. T : 01 42 89 50 05.