VIENNA.- mumok presents the first solo museum exhibition of Kazuna Taguchi outside Japan, who lives and works in Vienna since 2013. The artist studied painting at Tokyo University of Arts. Her enigmatic works depict body fragments, gestures, and gazes in the surrealist tradition of undermining conventional representations of the female body. Drawing from a repository of image sources, Taguchi interweaves different temporalities, narrative spaces, and viewing regimes. In her pictures, the figures seem suspended in a phantasmatic moment between appearance and vanishing.
Taguchi’s transitory work at the threshold between painting and photography self- reflexively echoes the historical discourses of both media and draws inspiration from collective visual memory. Her working method privileges repetitive resonance and reanimation over conventions of new creation and linear progression. Time and again, she returns to pre-existing images or image fragments, whether her own or those of others. This source material—whether anonymous, mass-media pictures, historical artworks, for example from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, private photographs from the artist, or revisions of her own works—is subjected to reworking, translation through her media of choice, and recombination. Taguchi herself compares the multiple layers and successive interventions, which finally culminate in small format analog black-and-white photographs, to the work of a painter who constantly returns to her easel. The unique aura of other-worldliness the artist imbues her works with can best be summarized with the term yügen: a central concept in Japanese aesthetics that favors allusiveness over explicitness and completeness, which is described as “a search for depth in the mist, transcendence in immanence.”
In her exhibition at mumok in Vienna, the artist presents two different groups of works in a specially designed architecture structured into a sequence of five small, serial compartments, comparable to a musical score. These spaces accommodate her most extensive work cycle to date, The Eyes of Eurydice, ongoing since 2019. Alluding to the mythological figure of Eurydice, whom Orpheus was unable to redeem for he dared a forbidden look at her on their way back from the underworld, the female faces, body fragments, gestures, or gazes in these works attain a phantomic quality in infinite shades of gray. Additionally, the new photographic series In Anticipation was created dedicated to Spatial Concepts, Expectations by Italian painter Lucio Fontana from the 1950s and 1960s. What began as Fontana’s attempt to escape the two-dimensional, merely illusionistic pictorial space by cutting into the material surface of the picture to provoke a coexistence with infinity becomes an exploration of what can potentially emerge in between these realms in Taguchi’s work.
The intangible distance that emanates from these phantasmal yet clearly composed photographs testifies to Taguchi’s resistant engagement with a present that is governed by visual feedback loops and the narcissistic de- and reconstruction of the digital “self.”
Kazuna Taguchi, born 1979 in Tokyo, lives and works in Vienna since 2013. She studied oil painting at the Tokyo University of Arts and developed her photographic practice self-taught.
Recent solo exhibitions include Black Paintings, Radio Athènes, 2023; A Quiet Sun, Ginza Maison Hermès Le Forum, Tokyo (curated by Reiko Setsuda, 2022), Due, Ermes-Ermes, Rome, 2021. In 2019, she had her first presentation Autumn Sale of Dreams and Love with Haus der Matsubara at Significant Other in Vienna in conjunction with the publication of the book Eurydice.
In 2024, she participated in the group exhibition Existence Bleeding at Chicago’s Longino, I.A.H.(curated by Alan Longino), and Stories from the Ground at Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, Sint-Martens-Latem (curated by Martin Germann). She conceived the group exhibition A Reflection on the Sublime, which was structured by Soshiro Matsubara at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, and published the books Joanne Kyger and A Reflection on the Sublime in parallel.
Curated by Heike Eipeldauer
