ANTWERP.- Ingrid Deuss Gallery presents Mono No Aware, a new exhibition by Belgian photographer Anton Kusters.
"Mono no aware" is a Japanese term used to describe an awareness of the passing moments of life. In his images, Kusters captures these moments as a feeling, a memory, a state of consciousness. Like when you're driving and the sun sets over the vast fields around you and the music's just right and the warm wind in your hair and your friends next to you and conversations go quiet and the long winding road ahead and your mind goes blank and you find yourself staring into the distance and then you snap out of it, everyone knowing you've all had – but can't keep – that moment that just passed.
There are many more examples of these kind of moments... We all know them. But we never know when they pop up. They stop time for us for just a second... and then we know we must move on.
Kusters worked on these series between 2009 and 2013, and is showing now the series in its totality.
Mono No Aware
Mono no aware (もののあはれ) is a Japanese term implying a “sensibility,” the awareness of and responsiveness toward something: an inanimate object or living thing, or an emotional response in another person. Through the years it became known as a refined sensitivity toward the sorrowful and transient nature of beauty. Kusters wants to evoke the feeling of the moment with his pictures. It’s about the memory of a moment in time and the meaning people give to these memories.
Kusters: “Maybe we should not remember all the details. Memories are no specific moments, but meanings that we carry along. One thing for sure: I feel I need to make this book, tell this story, because, in a way I can't really explain, I believe it's important we keep our little moments just a little longer. Try to stop time. Just sometimes. Just a little bit.”
Anton Kusters was born in Belgium (1974), obtained a master's degree in political philosophy at K.U.Leuven (Belgium), and studied photography at STUK Leuven (Belgium) and Academy of Fine Arts, Hasselt (Belgium). Currently he lives & works in Belgium and Tokyo (Japan). Together with David Alan Harvey he founded BURN Magazine, a platform dedicated to emerging photographers.
Kusters tries to understand the world around him, and expresses the impossibility of this understanding in any way he can. Telling visual stories through images and words, often combined into book, exhibit and design, he continually confronts himself with the limits of his own capabilities.
The Belgian photographer is fond of long term projects. For his first and widely acclaimed series Yakuza, he was allowed entry into one of Japan’s Yakuza crime families. Kusters spent 10 months negotiating before ever being allowed access to the yakuza, then spent two years photographing them, all part of his book project, called ODO YAKUZA TOKYO. With a mix of photography, film, writing and graphic design, Kusters tried to share not only their extremely complex relationship to Japanese society, and also to show the personal struggle that each family member faces: being forced to live in two different worlds at the same time; worlds that often have conflicting morals and values… It turns out not to be a simple ‘black’ versus ‘white’ relationship, but most definitely one with many shades of grey.
His work has been featured in The Sunday Times Magazine, New York Times, l'Espresso, GEO magazine, TEDx, El Pais, BBC, BBC Radio 4, Leica M Magazine, dS Weekblad (De Standaard), Dagens Næringsliv, Cobra.be, De Laatste Show, VOP Taiwan, The Japan Times, ELLE Men, Marie Claire, BURN Magazine, Status Brazil and City to City China, amongst others.
His work has been exhibited in Maastricht (NL), Genk (BE), Rome (IT), Barcelona (ES), Sydney (AUS), Hong Kong (HK), Liège (BE), Montpellier (FR), Genève (CH), Aalst (BE), Hasselt (BE).
He has taught workshops in Berlin, Venice and New York.
