Artist Selectors
Artist
Selector
Michiko Kasahara
Vice Director of Bridgestone Museum of Art, Ishibashi Foundation
Selected Artists
Born in Nagano prefecture, Japan. B.A. in Sociology, Meiji Gakuin University, Tokyo, 1983. M.A. in photography, Columbia College, Chicago, 1987.
Selected curatorial works: “ I know something about love, Asian Contemporary Photography”, 2018, “Dayanita Singh, Museum Bhavan”, 2017, ”somewhere between me and this world – Japanese contemporary photography”, 2012, “Love’s Body – Art in the age of AIDS”, 2010, “on your body, Japanese contemporary photography”, 2008; “ishiuchi miyako, mother’s 2000 – 2005, traces of the future”, as a commissioner of japanese pavilion of the 51st Venice biennale,2005. “mot annual, life actually, the works of contemporary japanese women”, the museum of contemporary art, Tokyo, 2005; ""Kiss in the Dark: Contemporary Japanese Photography"", 2001; ""Love's Body --- Rethinking the Naked and the Nude in Photography"", 1998; ""Alfred Stieglitz and his Contemporaries"", 1997; ""Gender Beyond Memory, The Works of Contemporary Women Artists"", 1996; ""American Documents in the fringe"", 1991; ""Exploring the Unknown Self --- Self-portraits of Contemporary Women"", 1991
Selected Books: Essays On Photography from Gender Perspective, 1991 – 2017, Satoyama-sha, 2018, Tokyo, “photographs of the war, its history and meaning”, The Politics Behind the War, Seikyu-sha, Tokyo, 2004; Photography As a Bulwark Against Era, Seikyu-sha, Tokyo, 2002; The Politics Behind the Nude, Chikuma Shobo, Tokyo, 1998
Vice Director of Bridgestone Museum of Art, Ishibashi Foundation since 2018. Chief Curator of Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography from 2006 to 2018. Curator of Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography from 1989 to 2002. Curator of Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo from 2002 to 2006.
Rather than completely new artists, I have chosen ones who are making names for themselves, having to an extent built careers as artists and received high acclaim. While each of them deals with different subjects, they all feel uncomfortable with existing values, ways of operating, and frameworks, and share with us the structure, content, and contemporary significance of close-to-home subjects. Learning history and surveying what is around them, they humbly and lightly present new expressions. The subjects that they confront are ones that all of us living today are forced to think about: families, ethnicities, generations, sexualities, disabilities, identities, memories, histories…. Since these are very complicated and formidable topics, many people might avoid such material. They are also similar in that they do not simplify, generalize, or draw easy conclusions about these difficult subjects. This also means that they face the difficult and complicated head-on.