{"id":5739,"date":"1995-08-19T10:34:00","date_gmt":"1995-08-19T08:34:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kunstmuseum.mscg-it.de\/?post_type=exhibition&#038;p=5739"},"modified":"2021-12-09T14:57:21","modified_gmt":"2021-12-09T13:57:21","slug":"paul-graham-empty-heaven-photographs-from-japan-1989-1995","status":"publish","type":"exhibition","link":"https:\/\/www.kunstmuseum.de\/en\/exhibition\/paul-graham-empty-heaven-photographs-from-japan-1989-1995\/","title":{"rendered":"Paul Graham. Empty Heaven. Photographs from Japan 1989\u20131995"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<div class=\"wp-container-1 wp-block-group alignfull has-gray-background-color has-background\">\n<div class=\"wp-block-columns\">\n<div class=\"wp-block-column\" style=\"flex-basis:66.66%\">\n<h2>Info<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Paul Graham was born in Harlow, England, in 1956 and lives in London. Over the past few years he has come to be regarded as the star of the contem\u00adporary British photo\u00adgraphy.<br>His works reveal a social concern and a political boom in \u201cpolitical correct\u00adness\u201d on the art&nbsp;scene.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<!--more-->\n\n\n\n<p>In the series \u2018Beyond Caring\u2019 of 1984\/85, Paul Graham put the English social system under the magni\u00adfying glass. In the mid-1980\u2019s he photo\u00adgra\u00adphed the escala\u00adting conflict in Ireland; the result was the series \u2018Troubled Land\u2019. Between 1988 and 1992 Graham travelled repeatedly through nine West European countries \u2013 including the newly reunified Germany \u2013 and the resulting series \u2018New Europe\u2019, was exhibited as the opening of the new photo\u00adgraphy museum of Winter\u00adthur, Switz\u00ader\u00adland. In 1994 he took the cease-fire in Ireland as the theme of a series of large-format colour photo\u00adgraphs of grey skies above Northern Irish&nbsp;towns.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Paul Graham is an extremely subtle observer, and although his photo\u00adgraphs have the apparent sponta\u00adn\u00adeity of snapshots, he often intui\u00adtively grasps the essence of a whole genera\u00adtion, a society or a nation. The photo\u00adgraphs never add up to a compre\u00adhen\u00adsive reportage; they are neither a finite selection nor a straight forward narrative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>They represent a fragment, a sequence of details and pictorial metaphors that seek to make the invisible visible: war, recession, unemploy\u00adment, consu\u00adme\u00adrism, friendship. They are the image of the end of our century, with its mood of terminal decadence and its simul\u00adta\u00adneous sense of a fresh&nbsp;start.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u2018Empty Heaven\u2019 \u2013 Photo\u00adgraphs from Japan 1989\u20131995 is Paul Graham\u2019s first museum exhibi\u00adtion in Germany. The work consists of 55 colour photo\u00adgraphs taken over the last seven years on numerous visits to the \u201cLand of the Rising Sun\u201d. The are the result of Paul Graham\u2019s intensive encounter with Japan, its socio-cultural struc\u00adtures and its history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In 1941 Japan declared war on the United States and Great Britain with the aggres\u00adsion of Pearl Harbour and so entered World War Two. After the dropping of two atomic bombs by the Americans on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in early August 1945, the Japanese bid for hegemony in Asia ended in uncon\u00addi\u00adtional surrender on 15 August 1945.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Fifty years later Paul Graham\u2019s work sets out to question the nation\u2019s apparent amnesia. His aim is to reach the point where strenuously repressed memories of painful past collide head-on with the social and psycho\u00adlo\u00adgical disci\u00adpline found in the economic super\u00adpower that is modern Japan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Paul Graham\u2019s motifs have little in common with the familiar clich\u00e9s about life in Japan. Despen\u00adsing with the tradi\u00adtional photo-journa\u00adlists wide angle lens, most of his photo\u00adgraphs are close-ups and are all taken with intense direct flash. They are filled with powerful sense of claus\u00adtro\u00adphobia, an inexor\u00adable confron\u00adta\u00adtion between the traumatic and the trivial. The faces of the employees of the Tokyo financial district; the artful coiffures of lone teenagers on the subway, and portraits of young Japanese women are juxta\u00adposed with the horrors of the atomic bomb: details from historic photo\u00adgraphs; scraps of irradiated skin preserved in formalin; burnt body parts. At the same time, he constantly reverts to an everyday world of insistent cheer\u00adful\u00adness: artifi\u00adcial flowers; cuddly animals in a bathroom; gift wrappings in hectic colours; coloured sugar in an elabo\u00adr\u00adately painted sugar bowl, a resple\u00adndent mural of the rising sun. Every\u00adwhere is a sense of the total control of personal freedom: a massive steel door, the tangled root-ball of a potbound plant, trees bound with cloth; even the sun symbol, the plain round disc, is cast concrete to adorn a brigde pillar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Collec\u00adtively these seemingly discon\u00adnected subjects begin to resonate, to coalesce, the trivial becomes shocking, the shocking becomes common\u00adplace. Questions about Japan and questions for us all begin to emerge from the work. Do we have to bear the weight of our history or should we shield ourselves against it? What should be hidden, re-written, sweetened, masked? What price do we pay to maintain order in our society?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-column\" style=\"flex-basis:33.33%\"><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Info Paul Graham was born in Harlow, England, in 1956 and lives in London. Over the past few years he has come to be regarded as the star of the contem\u00adporary British photo\u00adgraphy.His works reveal a social concern and a political boom in \u201cpolitical correct\u00adness\u201d on the art&nbsp;scene. Info Paul Graham was born in Harlow,&nbsp;[\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"template":"","meta":{"wp_typography_post_enhancements_disabled":false,"kunstmuseum_formatted_page_title":"","exhibition_title":"Paul Graham","exhibition_subtitle":"Empty Heaven. Photographs from Japan 1989-1995","exhibition_alternative_text":"","exhibition_start_date":"1995-08-19T10:47:00","exhibition_end_date":"1995-11-12T10:47:00","exhibition_gallery":"","exhibition_poster":8408},"tags":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v19.4 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Paul Graham. Empty Heaven. 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