Asako Narahashi was born in Tokyo in 1959. While attending Waseda University, Tokyo, she joined Foto Session workshops by Daidō Moriyama (1938–) in 1986. In 1989 she held her first solo exhibition Dawn in Spring, which was published as a photobook under the same title in 2023. This book is composed of black-and-white photos depicting motifs that resonate with the principles of are bure boke (grainy, blurred and out-of-focus) established by Moriyama, while remaining slightly different. Narahashi’s first photos were taken on a trip to the Kyushu region and then closer to the main island of Okinawa Prefecture and Taketomi Island, acting like a diary.

The year 1989 marked a turning point in Japan, moving away from the era Moriyama and other Provoke artists experienced the 1960s. It heralded the end of the Showa era and start of the Heisei, the introduction of the consumption tax, the impending end of Japanese economic development, and, for the artist, her debut as a photographer after graduation. In 1990 Narahashi opened her own gallery space 03 FOTOS and showed the “NU-E” series in seventeen exhibitions between 1992 and 1997, the results of which were published as a photobook in 1997. “NU-E” is the Japanese term for a legendary, monstrous creature whose head is that of a monkey, whose legs are those of a tiger, and who has a snake’s tail. In other words, it refers to something without a graspable outline, whose form is constantly shifting. It was under this title that the artist tried to capture something of the nature of Japanese society, where developed cities and rural countryside coexist alongside each other, after the myth of economic growth had collapsed.

Along with these black-and-white images in the series “NU-E,” Narahashi began taking a series of colored photographs titled “as half awake and half asleep in the water,” which was accumulated in a photobook published in 2007 with the same title as the series title. This series, which is still ongoing, consists of color photos taken from the sea facing towards the land. Each work is titled to reflect where it was taken, but what we see in the work is totally different from our ordinary point of view. It is a point of view floating on top of the sea. Since it has lost a sense of being anchored on solid ground, the angle can sometimes be random, in many cases inclined. The composition of the images resembles a color-field painting: almost half the bottom is covered by the out-of-focus sea, while the upper half shows the sky, buildings on land, and mountains. As the title implies, this composition presents a perspective that is between wake and sleep, which can also be read as riyama’s are bure boke, an attempt to depict our contemporary condition in which people can easily be swept away and submerged under the sea without a common narrative that might serve as something stable. Through these works our imaginations can perhaps expand to encompass the ocean that occupies some 70 per cent of the planet, where the remaining land represents the subject of conflicts for over the course of human history.

In 1998 she won the Photographic Society of Japan, New Photographer Award, and a decade later she received the 24th Higashikawa Prize, the Domestic Photographer Award.