KANA KAWANISHI PHOTOGRAPHY is pleased to announce the opening of Toshihiro Komatsu’s solo exhibition Topophilia: Japanese Houses, from Saturday, January 25th, 2020. This exhibition will introduce Japanese Houses, a series in which Komatsu has been continuing over two decades since 1997. It will be the first time in 17 years that the series will be exhibited in Tokyo, since its last time in the exhibition On Happiness: Contemporary Japanese Photography (2003, Tokyo Photographic Art Museum).
Japanese Houses is a photographic work that captures “families” and “houses” in the areas Komatsu has been based in including Shizuoka, Tokyo, Shiga, and Kyoto. In the works, the “houses” are allocated as the “faces” of the residents as a photo-montage/photo-collage. The series is created with the awareness of typological photography, typified by August Sander’s portraits and photographs of water towers by Bernd & Hilla Becher. Through collecting photographs of certain kinds of subjects, Komatsu examines the distinctions among images and what the accumulation of multiple images visualizes.
