The Reverse of a Painting - Modern Japanese Yōga Ⅰ
Year: 2026
Material/Technique: Canvas, UV Print
Size: 35 × 41 × 2.2 cm
Edition: Edition Available
Signed:Not Set
About the Work
- Year
- 2026
- Material/Technique
- Canvas, UV Print
- Size
- 35 × 41 × 2.2 cm
- Edition
- Edition Available
- Signed
- Not Set
- Frame
- Not Set
- Work Certificate
- Not Set
- Category
Work Details
Layered UV print on canvas
Ed.5 (A.P.2)
Ed.1/5
"The Reverse of a Painting Modern Japanese Yoga"
If the front of a painting is the place where the work is composed and presented, the reverse is a space where the maker's habits, ways of handling the work, and traces of the life surrounding it become visible. I photograph the backs of anonymous modern Japanese paintings from a time when the term yōga (Western-style painting) was still in common use, treating them as still lifes.
When I was given the theme "inside and outside," I thought of Cornelis Norbertus Gijsbrechts's The Reverse of a Framed Painting (c. 1670). We seem to be facing the surface of a painting, yet what appears before us is only its reverse. When the reverse becomes the front, the life that once lay outside the painting is exposed as a still life.
Exhibition Information
View in a Room
Artist
Contemporary Artist / Photography, Moving Image
Mami Kosemura is a Tokyo-based contemporary artist working primarily with photography, moving image, and installation.Drawing on classical Western painting, still life, and traditional Japanese painting, she reconstructs pictorial images using real objects and spaces, presenting them through photography and moving image. Her practice includes what she calls “moving still lifes,” created through techniques such as stop-motion, high-speed photography, and extended-duration filming, as well as tranquil photographic works that embody extensive research and accumulated time.Her work develops from experiments prompted by the question of whether media art can engage bodily sensation, while seeking to subtly introduce the question, “What is reality?” into the work itself.In recent years, she has developed research-based projects in regional art festivals, examining Japanese everyday life and material culture from the Meiji and Taisho periods into the modern era through objects and traces preserved in buildings and storehouses, as well as through modern painting. Using photography and moving image, she recreates paintings that emerge in places where different periods and cultures intersect, transform, and become entangled.Following a research residency in New York in 2016, she held a solo exhibition at Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, in 2018. Her most recent solo exhibition was held at ZILART Museum in Moscow in 2026, following Before the Beginning at MA2 Gallery in 2023, presented as part of the Regional Collaboration Program of the Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2023. She participated in the Setouchi Triennale in 2025 and Tokyo Biennale in 2026, and is scheduled to participate in the Boso Triennale in 2027.Kosemura completed the doctoral program in Oil Painting at the Graduate School of Fine Arts, Tokyo University of the Arts. She is currently Professor at Tokyo University of the Arts and Senior Lecturer at Image Forum Institute of the Moving Image.
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