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Professional technique and perspective
Night reading photographs
Hiroyasu Yamauchi

The photography philosophy of 13 photographers

Kyouji Takahashi
Masashi Sanai
Mika Ninagawa
Yoshiyuki Okuyama
Kotori Kawashima
Kozue Takagi
Yuki Aoyama
Munemasa Takahashi
Nao Nakai
Mami Kosemura
Ayaka Yamamoto
Masumi Ishida
Hiroshi Sugimoto
Seibundo Shinkosha

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The 10th night  Mami Kosemura

Paintings, photos and videos. Mami Kosemura's work has a mysterious and elusive feeling and continues to drift between the three media. In 2018, She held a solo exhibition "Mami Kosemura: Phantasies Over Time" at Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo which attracted much attention. What is the process and how does her subconscious come through her pieces ?

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The solo exhibition opened in 2018 at the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, in Tokyo. Set in a prewar residence as an exhibition space, the Hara Museum provided a stunning backdrop for the exhibition. The space and the exhibition were so complementary that it made me think that her art had been a part of the building since it was built. She said the exhibition was organized taking into account the history and characteristics of each room.

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The Hara Museum was originally a private residence and is now a museum dedicated to contemporary art. There is a dual aspect that the space is clean, although a hint of life remains somewhere. I wanted to make an exhibition that takes advantage of that atmosphere. My work is also a digital work, but it still has a physical presence, so I felt that it is compatible with the duality of the Hara Museum.

The five exhibition rooms are divided on the first floor and the second floor, and the flow line of visitors is complicated, so I re-planned the floor plan more than 10 times. I thought that it would be nice if the visitors could go through each room and could experience a self-contained story. Have I successfully stimulated your imagination ?

I've re-titled the exhibition many times as well.  I wanted the exhibition's title to be like title of a painting. I wanted the title to feel like a little classic painting exhibition, not a media art exhibition or a photography exhibition.

The Japanese exhibition title "Gen-ga" is a term we coined, and was an idea by a curator at the Hara Museum. "Gen-ga" means an illusionary visual image. It was born while we were discussing our desire to show the feeling of the duality of my work: it is a substantive painting close to an illusion or perhaps-  just an illusion of an actual painting.

In the subtitle "The epidermis of the image", I'm conscious of the outer reaches of the image. For example, the surface of the paint on the canvas, or the glass surface of the monitor, is "The epidermis of the image".  When we concentrate on the contents of paintings and videos, the paint surface and glass surface become invisible, but we are still physically looking at the paint and glass. You can see it if you want to see it, but you can forget it if you decide not to see it. It's interesting because the image has two dimensions.

I was thinking about having a title that expresses that feeling. Then, as the word "Gen-ga" says, is a painting an illusion ?  It's hard to say, but I think it's true that the vision of a painting is a little off from ordinary reality, no matter how realistic it may be. Obviously it's not the real thing. 

Thinking about reality in painting is difficult because the picture will always be a fake copy of something. However, when a picture that seems to be fake begins to move as a video, the movement makes people feel that it is quite realistic and vivid. Will people perceive it as fiction ? Or can people feel the reality ?

I'm always make my pieces in an effort to answer this question.

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I want to ask her why she places so much weight and meaning on the naming of her exhibition. "Why do you bother to do that ?" Mami Kosemura's creations are surprisingly complicated. 

For example, in one of her early animation "Sweet Scent", the motifs are assembled as a set, exactly like the referenced still life. In this piece it was "Still life with orange, lemon and cup of water" drawn by Francisco de Zurbarán, 17th century Spanish painter.

Then she takes a picture of it, but it's a single record of finished product.  She compels herself to do lengthy tasks, such as keeping the shutter on every few hours for days. Furthermore, she manipulates the enormous amount of photographs taken in such a way and connects them together into a single movie, then finally it becomes the completed work.

In her recent photograph series, "Objects -New York-", she creates an image that looks like an old still life painting, using garbage and junk collected on the streets or thrift shops in New York. In her photo documentation of it, it becomes a work of art.

Why does she do such complicated things ?

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Speaking of "Sweet Scent", the process begins with placing motifs in a manner similar to an old painting. Take a picture of it. Then, although it already looks like a painting, it still looks like a photograph. Then, I digitally manipulate it to make it more like a painting. If I quickly show someone the image and ask them whether it is a photograph or a painting, and they answer "Isn't it a painting?", the process would be finished. At this point, the photo is out of reality and almost fiction.

The assembled set is left as it is, and I continue to take photographs at the same angle, every few hours at regular intervals. For many months.

I do the same processing on a huge group of photos to create "painting-like photographs". Each one of them is a "photograph like painting", so it looks fake. However, when you project thousands of images in sequence, that is, when you animate them, the process of decaying, dying, and crumbling is real, so the viewer thinks it is real. Human perception of movement seems to be quite sensitive. When the movement is real, people feel it true. To put it the other way around, even if there is a CG image that is so elaborately made and looks only like a real picture, we feel it's very artificial when the motion is mechanical or too smooth.

Through my work, I aim to discover how our minds when we choose to perceive something as reality even though we know it is fake. I would like to experience such a strange feeling myself. 

I'm often asked, "What is this ? A Picture ? A Photo ? or a Video ?" However, honestly, I don't care about the definition. After publishing a work, after hearing other people's interpretations, I realize "Oh, this looks like a photographic work to them."  "This movie was selected to appear in a film festival, so it belongs in the movie category." Sometimes I try to look at my work through the eyes of my audience. If I was asked, "Okay, what are you going to make ?  I wouldn't be able to answer the question easily. Because I never have a simple answer to this question, I try to construct my concept one component at a time. "If I were to recreate the composition of a painting with more dimensions, how would it manifest itself."  "If the image starts to move and change, how will it affect us ?." And I feel that these questions lead me to the work that must be done.  I believe that in order to create work that contains mystery, the artist must act from a place of discovery as well.  I attempt to uncover the piece rather than create it from a predetermined blueprint. 

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In Kosemura's work, pictures, photographs, and images are treated equally as valuable materials for her visual inquiry. Thinking again, the roots of these media are almost the same. so it makes sense to try to integrate them in the work. Historically, there were paintings and sculptures. Since the ancient days of living in a cave, people have been painting here and there, sculpting or forming things into statues. People were very pleased to see animals from far off lands and important people who were far away. Expression skills gradually improved, and by the time the Renaissance emerged in Italy, people had invented ways of drawing in which a flat surface could show depth and things could appear 3-dimensional.  It is the perspective and shading methods developed by Leonardo da Vinci and others that took this to the next level. With the advent of photography in the 19th century, it became easy to create lifelike images.  The concepts that seek realism in painting have lead to the discover of photographic method, and the paintbrush was upgraded to a device called a camera. Video technology was also developed as a follow-up, but this was a mechanism to create moving pictures by connecting countless photographs. In other words, painting, sculpture, photography, and video are all connected. It was Kosemura's work that swallowed all of these elements and used them to create something that could only be described as "expression." In addition to the question here, whether it's a painting, a photo, or a video, it still reflects the outside world. The creators of visual art that captures real life seem to enjoy the process of reproduction. What is so delightful about recreating reality for the creators ?

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For example, suppose you draw something on plain white paper. Draw a line and add weight to express thickness. As the drawing nears completion, suddenly, things come together and the two-dimensional world expands into a three-dimensional world. Then, the blank space on the paper becomes physical space instead of just a white plane. That means, When you are drawing the front side of the motif, you feel that the tip of the pencil is in the foreground. But when you are drawing the back of the motif, you physically feel that the tip of the pencil is in the background.

It is still fun no matter how many times I experience this moment when the vision in front of me changes and the illusion appears. First of all, it is interesting that the relationship between myself and the object in my piece becomes visible. This drives me more than the desire as a creator to show something to others. Furthermore, I also like finding situations that look alike but are a little different. No matter how carefully you draw something, you can't draw it exactly the same twice. Each person has their own filter, with different ways of looking at things and different ways of thinking. No matter how faithfully you try to reproduce it, individual differences will occur and a subtle gap will occur. I am interested in the imperfections and the defects due to the differences in physical individuality.

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[Photo]
P161 - 163 《Drape》　　P164 - 165 《Objects - New York -》   P166 - 167 《Guise》   P166 - 167 《Banquet》