Nobuyoshi Araki

Nobuyoshi Araki is one of Japan's most celebrated and controversial photographers. Although he has been working for over thirty years and has more than eighty books to his credit, it is only in the 1990s that his work has become widely known internationally. In 1999 he was the subject of a major retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo. This is his first solo exhibition in Canada.

Araki is recognized for work, in which everything from the most mundane to the most intimate is a pretext for photography. The exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery, consisting of several bodies of work, emphasizes Araki's interest in the dividing line between the ordinary and extraordinary, fiction and reality, restraint and excess, art and obscenity. It also reveals Araki's obsession with Tokyo as a site of memories, transformation, discovery and chance encounters. Although these themes are presented in the context of Japanese culture, he reveals unsettling incongruities that are familiar elsewhere. The often blunt images of both erotic subject matter and the urban environment—images that have been compared to those of Nan Goldin and Larry Clark—provide a contrast to his lushly coloured images of flowers and the spontaneous smiles of individuals living in his boyhood neighbourhood. The appeal of Araki's work lies both in its sensationalism and its honest approach to human existence.

Curated by Yoshiko Isshiki and Keith Wallace

A large scale photo collage is installed on a white gallery wall. The collage is made up of  a 10 x 10 grid of photographs of various flowers and is almost the full height and width of the wall.

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06-NobuyoshiAraki-1999.jpeg

Many photographs are installed on the gallery walls. There are some small black and white photographs attached to the side walls. A large-scale coloured photo collage is mounted on the middle wall.

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01-NobuyoshiAraki-1999.jpeg

Two gallery walls are filled with black and white photographs. The left wall is covered by small photographs aligned in vertical rows. Six large ones, with some paints on, are on the other wall. 

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02-NobuyoshiAraki-1999.jpeg

A gallery wall is filled with small black and white photographs, many of which are of a naked woman, still life, and landscape. Each vertical row has 16 photographs, and there are more than 27 rows.

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03-NobuyoshiAraki-1999.jpeg

Six black and white photographs are installed in the gallery. The same woman is depicted naked, half-clothed, or fully clothed. Strokes of primary and secondary colour paints run across the pictures. 

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04-NobuyoshiAraki-1999.jpeg

Black and white photographs are installed on a gallery wall. Many of them show human figures in various outside settings. One row contains 2 pictures and 14 rows are visible in this photograph.

Nobuyoshi Araki

Exhibitions