Enchanting Winter Museum ”Real☆Fiction”―Photographs Play

The show is the 3rd collaborative project conducted between Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Fukuoka Art Museum, and Fukuoka City Museum. This time, it is themed on “Real Fiction,” and our exhibition titled Photographs Play, explores approximately 30 photography works from Asia, in which visual artists take on another guise in their own art or creates artificial and imaginary worlds using contrived photographs, etc.

Self-portrait style artwork, in which the artists themselves appears is known for a series of works by Cindy Sherman (1954- ), an American artist active since the late 1970s, or by Morimura Yasumasa (1951- ), a Japanese artist who embed himself into iconic images of famous paintings or celebrities. The artists introduced in this exhibition, on the other hand, seek to articulate a difficult reality of the state or the society in which she or he lives in by acting a particular role rather than by transforming her-/himself to draw a portrait of someone else.

A Sri Lankan artist, Pradeep Thalawatta, for instance, stands on the street that is destroyed by a long civil war arising out of religious conflicts. The artist, who is a Buddhist, stands on a road that was demolished during long civil war arising from religious conflicts. Thalawatta, wearing clothes on which sacred patterns of Hindu temples are applied, looks straight as if he is seeking to foresee the direction of the post-war society. A female Myanmar artist, Nge Lay plays a male role in her anniversary photographs with a family without a father. A Korean artist, Nikki S. Lee plays various roles by changing her appearance like a chameleon. She acts for assimilating herself into different communities and classes that exist in the United States.

What will you discover in the schism between the realities and fictions shown by these artists’ photographs?