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SHINGO YOSHIDA
(b. 1974 in Tokyo, Japan. Lives and works in Marseille, France)
Shingo Yoshida received his MA with highest honors from Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Art, Villa Arson in Nice France in 2004. In 2005 he earned a post-graduate diploma at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, France, and subsequently in 2007 he received another post-graduate diploma in the Program La Seine of Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris. Yoshida completed the prestigious international artist residencies at Villa Arson, Nice, France (2013), and the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, France (2007-8), among many others. In 2017, MOMENTUM invited him to show his film and photographs made in Siberia in an exhibition for the UN Conference on Climate Change, COP23. Subsequently, his work came to be acquired by the Art Collection of the Ministry of Environment, Germany. In 2016, his film works entered the collections of three major institutions in Berlin: the Berlinische Galerie, the Akademie der Künste, and Fluentum.
Yoshida’s work has been shown in numerous international exhibitions, including: Berlinische Galerie, Museum for Modern Art & Videoart at Midnight, Berlin, Germany (2020); Yebisu International Festival for Art and Alternative Visions, Loko Gallery, Tokyo, Japan (2020); S.Y.P. Art, Tokyo, Japan (2019); Mikiko Sato Gallery, Hamburg, Germany (2018); Pavillon am Milchhof, Berlin, Germany (2018); UN Conference on Climate Change, COP23, Ministry of Environment, Berlin & Bonn, Germany (2017); ikonoTV (2017); Gunma Museum of Art, Tatebayashi, Gunma, Japan (2016); Tokyo Wonder Site / Kunstraum Kreuzberg-Bethanien, Berlin, Germany (2016); ‘POLARIZED! Vision’ Competition Winner, Lapland, Rovaniemi, Finland (2015); Mulliqi Prize, National Gallery of Arts, Prishtina, Kosovo (2016); Instituto Zappa, Accademia Di Brera, Viale Marche, Milan, Italy (2016); Onufri International Prize, National Gallery of Arts, Tirana (2016); Videoart at Midnight #67, Babylon Cinema, Berlin, Germany (2015); Istanbul Modern Museum, Turkey (2015); 60th International Short Film Festival, Oberhausen, Germany (2014); Villa Arson Nice Centre National d’Art Contemporain, Nice, France (2013); Arte TV Creative, France-Germany (2013); 66th Cannes Film Festival, France (2012); Museo de Arte Contemporáneo MAC, Santiago, Chile (2012); Maison de l’Amérique Latine, Paris, France (2012); 22nd, 23rd, 27th FID International Film Festival, Marseille, France (2011, 2012, 2016); ‘Based in Berlin’ by Klaus Biesenbach, Christine Macel and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Berlin, Germany (2011); Rencontres Internationales Film Festival, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2010); Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France (2007, 2012); Sonom 07, Festival of UNESCO Universal Forum of Cultures, Monterrey, Mexico (2007); Lyon Biennale, France (2005); NCCA Natuional Center of Contemporary Art, Moscow, Russia (2005), among many others.
Photographer and video artist Shingo Yoshida finds inspiration in travelling, myths, traditions and the overwhelming beauty of nature. With a practice based on seeking out what is normally hidden from view, Yoshida considers the world as his studio and therefore a place of constant creation. In his video and photographic works Yoshida expresses his deep reverence for nature and its power.
I travel to many countries around the globe, which makes my work site-specific. It is essential that I adapt to the lifestyle and social codes of each new environment. What I have learned while searching for almost forgotten and hidden legends or myths is that humans live in a state of powerlessness in the face of nature. My existence as a human is a humble one. And yet, over the course of my life, this sense of meaninglessness has been periodically disrupted by encounters with the magnificent, especially in nature.
My main goal as an artist is to reconstruct my memories of such experiences. Paradoxically, since becoming aware of how small my own existence is, I have felt the need to investigate it. I do this by means of comparison: I search for legends and myths hidden somewhere in the world that are in danger of being forgotten. This is why I continue to undertake long journeys.
I believe that by examining societies at the micro-level (as micro-societies), there are many hidden stories to be discovered. I try to find micro-societies and investigate their cultures in order to achieve a broader understanding of the world.
My work is a journey, so to speak, that entails everything from the moment I leave my house until I reach my destination. Life is a series of instant moments, and I think my challenge is not to ask whether I should live earnestly or what I have reached, but how I lived and what kind of work I am going to leave behind. Therefore, my work changes and grows with the course of my own life.
[Shingo Yoshida]
THE SUMMIT
2019/20, Video, 23 min 54 sec
Translations of the HAIKU in the video:
下界まで断崖富士の壁に立つ 山口誓子
[Standing atop a sheer cliff of Mt. Fuji continuing down to the world below]
Seishi YAMAGUCHI
大沢崩れ覗きてすくむ登山靴 北舟子 (祖父)
[Looking down Osawa Kuzure my feet tremble]
Hokushushi
初富士に一礼頂に父の句碑 南舟子 (父 : 菊次郎)
[Making a bow to Mt. Fuji on New Year, where stands a stone tablet inscribed with my father’s haiku]
Nanshushi
“On August 20th, Shōwa 49 (1974), a stone tablet inscribed with a haiku was set atop Mt. Fuji. This was my father’s near-reckless project – to fulfill the dream of my grandfather who was a haiku poet — to bring a stone tablet to Kengamine next to the observatory on Mt. Fuji, the highest peak of Japan worshipped as its symbol from ancient times.”
[Shingo Yoshida]
Following in his father’s and grandfather’s footsteps, Shingo Yoshida embarks upon a journey to the peak of Mt. Fuji – Japan’s national monument. The Summit was made at the height of the global pandemic lockdown in the winter of 2020, when the closest most of us got to travelling was looking through old photographs or watching films about far-away places. Yoshida chose this time of travel bans and closed borders in which to undertake this most personal of journeys, travelling back to Japan from Berlin in order to re-live his forefathers’ dream to place his grandfather’s poetry atop Mount Fuji.
The Summit is a film of static shots and mobilized photographs. In an interplay between photography and moving image, the video comingles images filmed by the artist in his ascent up the mountain, with historic footage of the construction of the observatory at its peak, and family photographs from 1974 – the year of the artist’s birth – of his father and grandfather placing a boulder engraved with the haiku written by Yoshida’s grandfather beside the observatory. This intergenerational journey through a timeless landscape is the work of an artist who approaches his practice like an explorer, inviting us to accompany him on his travels.
[Rachel Rits-Volloch]