Artist Talk—Yuki Tawada, Yurie Nagashima, and Tomoko Sawada

Join us at ICP for a conversation with the artist Yuki Tawada, Yurie Nagashima, and Tomoko Sawada featured in our current exhibition I’m So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now. The disccusion will encompass Tawada’s latest publication, “FIRE WATER”, as well their intergenerational practices. The discussion will be followed by a signing in the ICP Shop. 

This program is being presented alongside Fujikina Festival. Register after reserving your Fujikina weekend pass.

Tickets to attend the conversation in person are $10 and include access to ICP’s galleries. Arrive early to see our current exhibitions I'm So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now and Laia Abril: On Rape and Institutional Failure, on view through January 4.

About the Book

Yuki Tawada is an artist who radically expands the possibilities of photographic expression by challenging the photograph as a physical object through processes such as scraping and burning. This book is the first mid-career retrospective of Tawada’s work, bringing together, series by series, nearly twenty years of her practice, from her earliest works to her most recent projects. In WHITE OUT, Tawada spends months rubbing and scraping the surfaces of large-scale photographic prints depicting crowds and cities with erasers and needles—not to erase the image, but to touch the unseen force within it. In I am in You, Tawada and her mother, who live apart, work with the same photograph of waves in their separate places, burning only the areas of water with a heated drawing tool. Through this process, personal memory opens outward into the time of the family and the memories of others. Through such physical interventions into the photograph, Tawada approaches the realms of individual and collective unconscious, memory, and emotion. In recent years, Tawada has extended this practice into ceramics through her collaboration with ceramic artist Fuku Fukumoto. In Lachrymatory, photographic ash—the remains of photographs burned by participants—is turned into glaze and fused into the surface of vessels. Through processes involving photographic transfer, bodily traces, clay, water, fire, and firing, Tawada approaches photography not simply as an image, but as something that can disappear, transform, and pass into other forms of matter. The collaborative ceramic works further explore photography as something that continues to transform within clay, water, fire, and gravity. The book includes Tawada’s own concept texts for each series, as well as essays by Pauline Vermare, Curator of Photography at the Brooklyn Museum, and art historian and critic Toshiharui Ito.

About the Speakers 

Yuki Tawada (b. 1978, Hamamatsu, Shizuoka, Japan) graduated from the Department of Applied Biological Chemistry, Faculty of Agriculture, Tohoku University, with a focus on biotechnology, and studied as an exchange student at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She later graduated from Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London, in Photography, and completed her PhD in Intermedia Art at Tokyo University of the Arts. She is currently a Professor at Kyoto University of the Arts. Her practice opens photography by hand as a kind of “field,” reweaving images through the exchange between body and information, and bringing transformation into being.

Born in 1973 in Nakano, Tokyo, Yurie Nagashima gained attention with her nude family portraits at age 20, winning the PARCO Prize. She earned a BA in Visual Communication Design from Musashino Art University (1995) and an MFA from California Institute of the Arts (1999). In 2000, she received the Kimura Ihei Photography Award. Her work—spanning self‑portraiture, family life, street and still-life photography—is known for its candid intimacy and feminist undertones, often probing identity, gender, and the everyday. She is a lecturer (Musashino + Tokyo Universities) and visiting professor at Kyoto Seika University; her work continues to influence both photographic and feminist discourse.

Tomoko Sawada (澤田 知子, Sawada Tomoko, born 1977 in Kobe, Japan) is a Japanese contemporary feminist photographer and performance artist. She has been included in numerous group shows in Japan, Europe and the US. Her first solo exhibition was in 1997 at Japan's Gallery Chat. In 2004 she was awarded the prestigious Kimura Ihei Memorial Photography Award for Young Japanese Photographer as well as the International Center of Photography Infinity Award in the category of Young Photographer. 
 

Header image:Yuki Tawada, FIRE WATER