Rinko Kawauchi

Rinko Kawauchi

History

The artist was born in Shiga, Japan, in 1972. She currently lives and works in Tokyo. Kawauchi burst on the international scene in 2001 when she was awarded the Kimura-Ihei-Prize, Japan’s most important emerging talent photography prize, shortly followed by the simultaneous publication of three beautiful books, Utatane (Catnap), Hanabi (Fireworks), and Hanako, her very personal study of a young girl of the same name. Met with great critical acclaim, these “visual essays” demonstrate her finesse and skill of telling a photographic tale. Since this triple-debut, the artist has gone to publish another eleven books, the newest of which are Illuminance and Ametsuchi. Kawauchi, currently one of the most famed contemporary female Asian artists, is a recipient the eminent Annual Infinity Award (2009) from New York’s International Centre of Photography, in the category Art, and similarly was shortlisted in 2012 for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. She has joined and held many group and solo shows both at home and abroad, with major solo exhibitions in the Fondation Cartier pour l’art Contemporain in Paris, London’s The Photographers’ Gallery, the Hasselblad Centre in Gothenburg, Semear Museu de Arte Moderna de Sao Paulo, the Vangi Sculpture Garden Museum in Shizuoka, or Brussels’ ARGOS Centre for Art & Media. Major group exhibitions to date include those at Munich’s Haus der Kunst, the Huis Marseille in Amsterdam, Museum of Contemporary Art, inTokyo, Toyota Municipal Museum of Art in Aichi, or the Brighton Photo Biennial 2010: New Documents. Her unique approach is like a “drawing senses”, embracing motifs of every day details as well as cycle of life and its transience, and has been admired by art lovers all over the world.

Profile

Rinko Kawauchi

Movies

「カナタの旅 Live at 横浜開港記念会館）」
「カナタの旅 Live at 横浜開港記念会館）」
Art Designer
In the sound of the historic building, Port Opening Memorial Hall, the overlapping tone of the band formation with percussion Ryota Tanaka and guitar Gen Tanabe became a performance that felt a certain heat with the new wind. A new song "some site" written for this day is also included, and it will be released for the first time in this work. Following Kanata, Rinko Kawauchi is on the jacket. Beautiful photographs of the sun moving to the endless sea, shining a faint light and disappearing all the boundaries , gently snuggle up to this album.
Halo
Halo
Director
Rinko Kawauchi's exploration of the cadences of the everyday has begun to swing farther afield from her earlier photographs focusing on tender details of day-to-day living.
Ametsuchi
Ametsuchi
Director
In Ametsuchi, Kawauchi brings together images of distant constellations and tiny figures lost within landscapes, as well as photographs of a traditional controlled burn farming method (yakihata) in which the cycles of cultivation and recovery span decades and generations. Punctuating the series are images of Buddhist rituals and other religious ceremonies-a suggestion of other means by which humankind has traditionally attempted to transcend time and memory.
Illuminance
Illuminance
Director
the extraordinary in the mundane, drawn to the fundamental cycles of life and the seemingly inadvertent, fractal-like organization of the natural world into formal patterns.
Nobody Knows
Nobody Knows
Still Photographer
In a small Tokyo apartment, twelve-year-old Akira must care for his younger siblings after their mother leaves them and shows no sign of returning.
Blue
Blue
Still Photographer
Kayako Kirishima of the third year at a high school feels a sense of isolation in school life and vague admiration and uneasiness in the future. One day she makes friends with Endō who is isolated from her surroundings because she remained in the same class for another year. Kayako is strongly attracted by Endō who shows her a world that she didn't know.