Seven family members and a cat all squeezed into the small five-room house, where Motoyuki Daifu grew up in Yokohama. This young photographer’s Family Project series documents the chaos of his family’s home life. Viewers of Daifu’s color photographs peer into the cramped, cluttered, and intimate world of their living quarters, what would normally be hidden from outsiders. The setting of dirty dinner plates and empty take-out food containers becomes an elegant still life series inhabited by what appear to be dozing inebriants. The artist turns what might initially appear as an offensive lifestyle into a light-hearted and stunning look at domestic life in contemporary Japan. The artist has described the private world by saying, “My mother sleeps every day. My dad does chores. My brothers fight. There are trash bags all over the place. Half-eaten dinners, cat poop, mountains of clothes: this is my lovable daily life, and a loveable Japan.”
Motoyuki Daifu is a representative of the youngest generation of Japanese photographers, who like the more senior Nobuyoshi Araki, use the snapshot as a way to represent his life. Daifu’s photographs appear to be full of humor, as he uses the clutter to his advantage, packing as much color as he can into each frame. The artist started to take photography seriously when he was nineteen. At that time, he enrolled in art school to study the subject, and gravitated toward photographing those things that were around his daily experience. Recently he has become interested in and influenced by contemporary art rather than straightforward photography. He would prefer to avoid simply being identified as a photographer, and intends to work across a range of media, with photography as his base.
Wolfgang Tillmans initiated the ongoing series Faltenwurf in 1989, representing compositions of unused clothing, with special attention paid to the ways in which they drape and fold...
7″ Single ‘Pop In’ by Martin Kippenbergher consisting of a vinyl record and a unique artwork drawn by the artist on the record’s sleeve...
Hako (2006) depicts a mysterious and dystopic landscape where the world becomes flat: distance between different spaces, depth of field and three-dimensional perceptions are canceled...
Lockhart’s film Lunch Break investigates the present state of American labor through a close look at the everyday life of the workers at the Bath Iron Works shipyard—a private sector of the U...
Tanaka’s unique understanding of objects and materials is reflected in the four photographs that document his Process of Blowing Flour ...
The types of objects Feldmann is interested in collecting into serial photographic grids or artist’s books are often also found in three dimensional installations...
Ramirez’s The International Sail is the fifth in a series that features an upside-down worn out, mended and fragmented boat sail...
Oded Hirsch’s video work Nothing New (2012) utilizes seemingly absurdist tropes to raise more trenchant questions about communal action and collective identity in modern day Israel...
A photograph of a tin box full of marijuana simply titled Green Box, speaks to the constantly changing status of the substance–once taboo or illicit, now a symbol of a growing industry in Northern California...
Naoya Hatakeyama’s series Rikuzentakata (2011) documents the devastating aftermath of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan...
Douglas Gordon’s single-channel video The Left Hand Can’t See That The Right Hand is Blind, captures an unfolding scene between two hands in leather gloves—at first seemingly comfortable to be entwined, and later, engaged in a struggle...
Naoya Hatakeyama’s series Rikuzentakata (2011) documents the devastating aftermath of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan...
Constructed out of metal or glass to mirror the size of FedEx shipping boxes, and to fit securely inside, Walead Beshty’s FedEx works are then shipped, accruing cracks, chips, scrapes, and bruises along the way to their destination...
The Italian photographer Tina Modotti is known for her documentation of the mural movement in Mexico...
The photograph Exquisite Eco Living is part of a larger series titled Executive Properties in which he digitally manipulated the images to insert iconic buildings of Kuala Lumpur in the view of derelict spaces also found in the city...