During his travels in Asia, Michael Kenna developed a fondness for certain places and patterns, to the point of rephotographing them periodically. The series thus created have become essential milestones in his work.

Composed of female nudes taken in Japan since 2008, the series Rafu is situated on the fringes of the artist’s usual work. Like his landscapes, however, it harnesses the interpretive power of photography to question the relationship between the body and space. The organic flexibility of the bodies is reflected in photographs of an oak tree in Japan on Hokkaido, taken from 2002 until its felling in 2009. Finally, architecture has also lent itself to a serial approach for Michael Kenna, particularly two types of structures that punctuate the landscapes of Japan and South Korea: torii, gates marking the entrance to Shinto shrines, and ancient lifeguard towers arranged along the beaches of South Korea.

If he often works in peaceful and silent places, Michael Kenna also photographs urban centers and traces of agricultural and industrial activity. In Asia as elsewhere, fields, cities, and construction sites invade the space and saturate the frame of the camera to the point of denying the very existence of nature. This iconography converses with a whole aspect of Japanese printmaking ukiyo-e fascinated by the unprecedented development of the capital Edo (Tokyo) in the 19th century.

National Museum of Asian Arts
Exhibition Curator
Edouard de Saint-Ours, Curator of the Photographic
Collections, Guimet Museum

To be continued, Visitor Guide