Private View: Scales by Naoya Hatakeyama

Naoya Hatakeyama has been showing his series of works such as Lime Works, Blast, River Series, Underground and Slow Glass since the 1980s. People hardly make an appearance in his photographs but his images show major human interventions in the landscape. Hatakeyama is based in Tokyo, which continually fuels his interest in the relationship between nature, the city and photography. “This artist breathes light and gives his breath as a gift to the world, which appears once again, with each draught of life, as an image, and always as if it were for the last time”, Amelunxen comments.

 

Hatakeyama observes that people strive to grasp the world as a whole, but because reality is too vast and our life too short to understand the whole, people needed to invent maps, models, signs and metaphors. Together with some of his unpublished works, the exhibition will showcase his masterworks, Scales, commissioned by Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), which explores the concepts of scale and perception of reality through architectural models, employing the vocabulary of photography.

 

Naoya Hatakeyama was born in 1958. He completed his graduate studies at Tsukuba University in 1984. In 1997 Hatakeyama received the 22nd Kimura Ihei Memorial Photography Award. His photographs are found in the public collections of the National Museum of Modern Art, Osaka, the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Yale University of Art Gallery, New Haven,the Swiss Foundation for Photography, Winterthur, La Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris, the Victoria & Albert Museum and Tate Gallery in London. Hatakeyama has been invited to participate in Les Rencontres d’Arles in 2003 and2009, and also shortlisted for the Prix Pictet 2009. Hatakeyama represented Japan in the 49th Venice Biennale.