Each year, the KG + Award rewards an emerging artist. The laureate wins an exhibition at the Sigma Corporation Gallery in Tokyo and some gears given by the photographic brand while Grand Marble Ltd. gave him a 3,800 euros grant. And next year, the winner will also be exhibited at the Kyotographie Festival in 2019.
This year, photographer Kenryou Gu won the award for his project Utopia. The photographer describes his project: “If utopias of the past existed in the form of widely shared worldviews, I prefer to use the expression” private utopia “to refer to this way in which people live within different utopias, the way they consume them. These private utopias are formed within stereotypes that make people aspire to a certain way of life, within which they create their own private utopia, which consists in evacuating all that could represent an obstacle, a difficulty, that we do not understand or that we do not want to see and from which we unconsciously look away. It is this system, this human construction, this set of manners and habits that make me look and lead me to identify these strange landscapes, these anonymous landscapes, as spaces between private utopias and landscapes of private intimacy. These are the landscapes I photographed. “
