Japanese photographer Hideyuki Ishibashi presents his experimental landscape prints at IBASHO in Antwerp
IBASHO is proud to present the second solo-exhibition at the gallery of the Japanese artist Hideyuki Ishibashi, ‘Imprint of Time’. With this exhibition Ishibashi, who lives and works in France, invites you to join him on his continuing exploration into the beginnings of photography.
Ishibashi’s photographic practices have been influenced by a disaster that happened in his youth:
“The Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake that occurred at 5:46 a.m. on 17 January 17 1995, instantly transforming the city of Kobe into a pile of rubble. The scenery that was there yesterday had disappeared, and a burnt field spread out. I was 9 years old when I saw such an unrealistic scene, and even at a young age, I felt the smallness of human beings and the power of nature. The fragmentary images that remain from that time have been indirectly involved in my creation to date, sometimes as dreams, and sometimes as the base of collages. By connecting these fragments between reality and fiction, I hoped to question the photographic image itself and the act of looking.
After the COVID-19 pandemic, I have started to see my experience during the earthquake from a different angle. Perhaps this is because of the sense of restoring lost time felt through the lockdown, or perhaps it is because spending 11 years in a foreign country has created a psychological distance from my own country that has allowed me to look at my own culture objectively. I remember the awe I once felt for nature as I watched its power gradually regain its true form through the suspension of human activity due to the lockdown. As I think about my own culture, which has always been threatened by natural disasters but has been seeking a form of coexistence with nature, I reflect on my own identity. Gradually, what was once too ordinary to see becomes visible...
With this thought process in mind, I explore the birth of photography through the relationship between nature, man, and culture. I attempt to investigate our relationship with nature through human interventions, such as man-made forests in an agricultural high school, a park with 144 years of history, or slag heaps in a northern French coal mining region. In an age when the generalisation of Midjourney and NFT has made the dialogue between us and materiality and images increasingly poor, I dare to try to find something essential in the dialogue between time and materials, photographic techniques and image... and I suddenly wonder, why do we take photographs?”
Ishibashi is highly experimental in his way of printing, often searching for ways to literally use nature in his works by making his photographic paper and pigments for printing from the plants that grow in the landscapes he photographs in, such as in the series ‘Fossil’ and ‘Chromophore’.
In his series ‘Atlas’ he confronts the viewer with the paradox of the first photographic images, before the discovery of the fixated image, where sunlight caused both the appearance and disappearance, and where brevity produced in return mental images and memories in the viewer.
In ‘Trails’ Ishibashi, inspired by Claude Monet’s ‘Cathédrales de Rouen’, decided to preserve the appearance of the Bois Parisien and the Six Muids by taking hundreds of photographs on different days, in different weather conditions, and at different times, and overlaying them on a computer. This working method has resulted in soft-coloured, impressionistic and poetic landscapes that establish the light, colours, and path of each of the seven days of the forests.
The exhibition ‘Imprint of Time’ runs from 25 November 2023 until 14 January 2024. Ishibashi will be present during the vernissage on Saturday 25 November from 14:00 - 18:00.
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