Land and Sea, 1970

Basel 2016
Land and Sea

Taka Ishii Gallery

Photography
Gelatin silver print
18.4 x 30.3 (cm)
7.2 x 11.9 (inch)
Land and Sea is a work that was presented at the 10th Tokyo Biennale: “Between Man and Matter” (also known as the Tokyo Biennale) in 1970, commissioned by Yusuke Nakahara. The work is comprised of a set of 24 prints –test prints produced by the artist himself – with the year, date, and time the image was photographed, each written by his own hand in the lower left corner. Kawaguchi selected the Suma coast, a setting that is familiar to him, as a place that embodies a world established through invisible and visible entities, and along it installed four planks that share the “relationship” of being cut out of the same tree, and then proceeded to photograph the scene. The work visualizes the entire world by means of the photograph that serves to objectify the conflictions of time and space and further formulates a “relationship” between the visible and the invisible within the context of the biennale as a landmark international exhibition that cohesively realized the various plans of artists from differing perspectives such as Post-Minimalism, Arte Povera and Mono-ha. Land and Sea not only is a historic piece that adheres to the theme presented, but at the same time is an important photographic work in the artist’s career.