Rinko Kawauchi, as it is, Marseille, ed. Chose Commune, 2020
→Rinko Kawauchi, Ametsuchi, New York, ed. Aperture, 2013
→Rinko Kawauchi, UTATANE, Tokyo, ed. Lettle More, 2001
Rinko Kawauchi: M/E ―On this sphere Endlessly interlinking, Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, Tokyo, 8 October–18 December, 2022/Shiga Museum of Art, 21 January–26 March, 2023
→KAWAUCHI Rinko: Illuminance, Ametsuchi, Seeing Shadow, Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, 12 May –16 July, 2012
→Semear, Musée d’art moderne de São Paulo, 19 juillet-23 septembre 2007
Japanese photographer.
Rinko Kawauchi graduated from Seian Women College (now Seian University of Art and Design). In 2002 she received the 37th Kimura Ihei Award for her two photobooks published in 2001, Utatane [drowsiness] and Hanabi [Fireworks]. The photographs in Utataneare typical of her style, in which a kind of ungraspable, fragile, but utterly beautiful time, light and colour is captured in a square-format frame. What appeared in her photos were not specific things as motifs, but rather a different aspect of reality easily overlooked in the business of daily life. These images came into the artist’s mind when she dozed off (utatane in Japanese, the title of the series) and realised that some of these visual memories had unconsciously become part of herself.
Kawauchi thought that quietness, fragility and anxiety resided in beauty and tried to capture these qualities in her photos. One can see how these accumulated images, which actually had an associated time duration, could come to mind in a short time in the photobook Illuminance (2009), whose first and last pages show an eclipse of the sun that happened only for about three and half minutes, combined with other images.
The circularity of birth and loss that continuously recurs has been the main theme for Kawauchi’s image making since the beginning. Although her subject seemed to shift from the ordinary scenery that surrounds us to Japanese local rituals and festivals, particularly in the series Ametsuchi [Heaven and Earth] (a photobook under the same title was published in 2013), the theme did not change. Kawauchi started to shoot in Aso in Kumamoto Prefecture in 2007, and the first scene she shot was a field burning. At the dawn of spring, fields are burned as part of the maintenance of the grass and river. When Kawauchi stood on the ground of Aso, she felt she was on the Earth for the first time.
She also photographed Shiromi Kagura in Miyazaki Prefecture for the Ametsuchi series. Kagura is a ritual dance celebrating a bountiful harvest, directed towards the heavens at the end of each year and which can be found across the whole of Japan. Kawauchi found that the cycles of nature and civilisation based on it were connected by human beings. As the scale of time and place associated with her subject matter changed, her works came to reflect the theme of birth, loss and rebirth.
According to Kawauchi, her perspective did not change much even after giving birth at the age of 44. Instead, her sense of the cruelty of unstoppable loss seems to have grown sharper as her daughter grew up. As it is, a photobook published in 2020, was composed of the photos Kawauchi took until her daughter turned three years old, and texts based on how the artist felt as a mother during these years.
In 2009 Kawauchi received the Infinity Award for Art from the International Center of Photography, bringing her worldwide acclaim. Her solo show Illuminance, Ametsuchi, Seeing Shadow was held at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography in 2012. For this exhibition, Kawauchi won the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology’s Art Encouragement Prize for New Artists.
A biography produced as part of the “Women Artists in Japan: 19th – 21st century” programme.
© Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions, 2024