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