La Fragua. Tabacalera Promoción del Arte (51 Embajadores Street of Madrid) inaugurates the exhibition Retratos de Asakusa next Friday 19 September, the first great individual exhibition of Hiroh Kikai’s work taking place outside Japan. Hiroh Kikai was born in 1945 in a family of farmers in Yamagata (Japan). In this exhibition, 55 of his photographs are presented in a project that continues today for which more than 600 portraits have been made.
Hiroh Kikai becomes a photographer after seeing Diane Arbus’s work in 1969; in 1973 he started to take pictures of people from Asakusa’s sector in Tokyo. Kikai’s topics have been taken from the flood of people and placed in front of the bare walls of the temple of Senso-ji. These are portraits irradiating a common feeling of hard winners, of idiosyncratic individualities.
All the photographs have concise notes of the artist and, many times, with funny descriptions about their characters. Placed together, the Retratos de Asakusa, face each other, from a classical meditation to the timeless complexities of the human condition. The exhibition will be open until 19 November.
