Twenty years ago, that was 1993, the year of tori (“Rooster” in the Japanese Juni Shi Calendar), Yuki Onodera left Tokyo for Paris to seek her creative inspiration. Between 1993 and 1997 she created her first trilogy, starting with “Liquid”, with water as the origin of creation, then she experimented with “Clothes” suspended in the air, and ended with “Birds” flying into nothingness. As she was living in Montmartre she had a window with an unhindered view. Always innovative in photographic technique Yuki invents a modus operandi using fixed camera and flash with cloudy sky as backdrop to portray “Second-hand Clothes” and to capture “Birds” in flight. By coincidence an installation at the Pompidou center by French artist Christian Boltanski, using a pile of used clothes to symbolize death, provided Yuki with the material to achieve her project. These “Portraits” of disincarnated clothes, or clothes without a body, floating against a cloudy sky, each with a distinct personality, although that of an invisible being, came to form a haunting reinterpretation of Lazarus raising from the dead. In April 2006 Onodera inaugurated the cycle of photography exhibition at the Shanghai Art Museum, her “Second-hand Clothes” mesmerized the audience.
Eight years later, Beaugeste Gallery in Shanghai is showing Yuki Onodera’s best known work under a new light. With her consent, her “Clothes” series are paired with her “Birds” series for the first time, displaying never-seen before diptychs. These bodyless “Portraits of Clothes” associated with the blurred feathers of birds taking off with a flap of wings, produce a powerful contrast between static and dynamic, between still-life and animation, transcending Roland Barthes’ concept of “that has existed” and Carl G. Jung vision of birds as messengers between heaven and earth, connecters between the living and the gods. As a result each work becomes a portrait of an angel.
This diptych presentation of the two seminal works by Yuki Onodera is further enriched by the title “View from the Window”, as a tribute to the first picture in the history of photography by Nicéphore Niépce “View from the Window at Le Gras” circa 1826-27. There is no coincidence that Yuki Onodera was awarded in 2006 the prestigious Niépce Prize.
EXHIBITION
View from the Window
Yuki Onodera
June 7th – September 12, 2014
Beaugeste Galerie
Shanghai
China
