Personal statement by japanese photographer Kikuji KAWADA
"I was born at the beginning of the Showa Era. There was a great war during my boyhood and then I lived during the period of re-construction and growth and now I slowly approach the evening of life. Through these photographs the cosmology is an illusion of the firmament at the same time it includes the reality of an era and also the cosmology of a changing heart." (Kikuji KAWADA)
Background information, content
"Astrology, once a scholarly tradition, binds astronomical phenomena to events of the human world. 'The Last Cosmology' reveals the preoccupation of Kikuji KAWADA with the cosmos, and his fleeting empathy for the abating custom of divination. Inspired by the apocalyptic sky-scapes of the painter Emil Nolde, Kawada photographed abnormal and calamitous weather conditions – gales that configure coiling cloud-patterns, electrical storms, or rain striking glass.
Captured between 1980 and 2000 - volume 'The Last Cosmology / Rasuto kosumoroji' by Kikuji KAWADA was originally published in parts in the 1980s. - the work is part of ‘The Catastrophe Trilogy’, a chronicle which ties together the dramas of the skies with the end of two historical eras on earth: the Showa Era in Japan, ending with the death of the Emperor in 1989, and 20th century’s close. KAWADA says, “I imagine the era and myself as an implicitly intermingling catastrophe... I want to spy on the depths of a multihued heart that is like a Karman vortex.” (© Mack books, 2015)
Book review
"The photo volume 'The Last Cosmology / Rasuto kosumoroji' by Kikuji KAWADA is an awkward journey through the lesser lights of heaven. Human beings rarely look up unless there is a genuine awe of inspiration or an aggrandized despair to set aside the fallibility of our mortality. Its brave to petition the skies for answers when all under our feet points towards a collapse. The book is somehow an essential inquiry of what it means to live with questions of origins, thoughts and beckons questions as to where we place ourselves within this dilapidated framework here on the ground. In a way, the book feels unintentionally cold and distant, but I realize this is a very personal journey and that his questions are perhaps different from my own. There are spectacular images of celestial oceans playfully jostled in between images of terra incognita, traces of machinery, collapsed habitats and images cloaked in a permeating darkness. Things feel at once homely, yet recognizable.
There is a pursuit here towards an imagined abyss. It is something of a slow train coming while being tied to the tracks. That stated this is the pursuit I have chosen reflecting on it as a whole. The photographer points towards a true vision of the chaos that surrounds us. It is an exceptional publication and it makes me seek higher truth in my very small life." (© Brad Feuerhelm, in: 'A Retinal Burn in Search of Answers from the Ecliptic and Permeating Darkness', American Suburb X, March 20th, 2015)
About Japanese photographer, Kikuji KAWADA (b.1933)
Photo books by as well as with works by Kikuji KAWADA
- Format
- Pb. (no dust jacket, as issued), 24 x 32 x 2 cm., 86 pp., 67 tritone b/w plates, text language: English