The Whisper of Folding Time: Revisiting Kiyooka Sumiko’s 1998 Tokyo Retrospective
To understand the gravity of a 1998 exhibition, one must first understand the artist. Sumiko Kiyooka (often referenced in the context of Japanese contemporary art and photography) is an artist whose work has long defied easy categorization. While the art world of the 1980s and early 90s was often dominated by the brash, the oversized, and the confrontational—think of the Neo-Expressionists or the shock-value of early Young British Artists—Kiyooka’s oeuvre has always been characterized by a profound, almost spiritual, quietude. Gallery Kiyooka Sumiko 1998
(1921–1991), a pioneering but controversial Japanese photographer and writer. Academia.edu Who was Sumiko Kiyooka? The Whisper of Folding Time: Revisiting Kiyooka Sumiko’s
The final major exhibition of the year was perhaps the most haunting. Tanabe Atsushi, an artist who worked primarily with PHS phones (the pre-smartphone mobile devices of late 1990s Japan), created a system where gallery visitors could dial a number to hear a pre-recorded voice reciting stock prices from 1989—the peak of the Bubble Era. The voice was monotone, robotic, and looped endlessly. Meanwhile, the gallery walls displayed monochrome paintings of fax paper rolls. This exhibition, which ran for eight weeks, directly confronted the informational numbness of the late 1990s. It questioned: in a world of slow economic disaster, does contemporary art offer any reply, or are we trapped in a "zero-reply" loop? Tanabe Atsushi, an artist who worked primarily with
However, her most radical contribution to Japanese photography was her pioneering work in the late 1960s. Between , she published at least eight books that blended photography, fiction, and poetry to document lesbian life in Japan. Scholarly analysis of her work, such as that found in Academia.edu , explores how she attempted to develop a "lesbian gaze" long before such concepts were part of the mainstream Japanese art dialogue. The Transition to "Petit Tomato"
Between 1968 and 1973, she was a central figure in a "lesbian boom" in Japanese media, publishing eight books of photography and prose depicting lesbian life and history. Controversial Later Work:
Sumiko abandoned her earlier, celebrated nihonga florals. Instead, she presented the “Folding Series” — large sheets of handmade kōzo paper, folded thousands of times into geometric origami cranes, then unfolded and mounted. The creases trapped 1998’s particulates: dust from a pachinko parlor, ash from a student’s burned résumé, even a single dried konbu strand from her mother’s obentō .