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November 4, 2006- December 23, 2006
Reception: November 3, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Akio Ohki
SEPIA International | The Alkazi Collection
148 W 24th St Akio Ohki Puli, the Day of a Festival |
The skewed perspectives of these images underscore this period of Taiwan’s disconnection with the outside world. Often taking his pictures from the hip, darkly printed, and using deep shadows as a dramatic compositional tool, Ohki's photographs paradoxically glow with an inner light. This light emanates from the faces of people who have adapted to this long-term political oppression.
During the course of this photographic odyssey, Ohki visited Taiwan over twenty times between 1971 and 1978. This is the first time his Taiwan series has been shown as a solo exhibition in the United States. Ranging from street scenes and festivals to shop interiors, portraits, and landscapes, these insightful images all share a sense of compressed energy -- dark as coal, with the same ability to generate heat and light. Three decades later, we can now share Ohki’s vision of that epoch in Taiwan’s history.
Under martial law, I would have no opportunity to publish my photographs, but there was nothing to deter me. The life of the people there and that of residents in postwar Fukagawa [Japan], where I was born, overlapped each other in me, impressing me with their inexplicable warmth and strength. Every element of Taiwan at the time, where a faint streak of light pierced the darkness, looked to me as intense as a sunbeam. --Akio Ohki, September 2000
Born in 1938 in Fukagawa, Tokyo, Ohki is a member of The Photographic Society of Japan. In addition to numerous exhibitions in Japan, he was also included in Sepia International’s exhibitions "Dream Street" and "Faces." Akio Ohki will be present at the opening reception and book launch for his monograph, Taiwan 1971-1978 (Nishinippon Newspaper Co., Ltd., 2000). Signed copies will be available at the gallery.
Art Reviews of Taiwan 1971-1978
| The New York Sun November 30, 2006 | William Meyers | "Nearly all the 40 black-and-white images by Japanese photographer Akio Ohki in his exhibition "Taiwan 1971-1978," currently at Sepia International, are absurdly mannered, but they work. This is partly because he exploits stylistic devices not uncommon in the practice of the Japanese visual arts-- certainly not uncommon in Japanese photographic practice-- and partly because these devices are appropriate to his subject matter. If the pictures tend to be grim, Taiwan in the concluding days of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang government was plausibly a grim place...." |
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