Photo by Keizo Kioku

TARO NASU is pleased to announce TAIJI MATSUE’s solo exhibition, entitled “makietaTYO”.

TAIJI MATSUE
Born in 1963. Lives and works in Tokyo. 
Graduated from the University of Tokyo in 1987, with a major in geology.
Won the Higashikawa New Photographer Award in 1996, the Kimura Ihee Photography Award in 2002, the Higashikawa Domestic Photographer Award in 2012, and The 25th Society of Photography Award in 2013.
 
His selected solo exhibitions include “JP-22” at the Vangi Sculpture Garden Museum (Shizuoka) in 2006; “Surficial Survey” at the IZU PHOTO MUSEUM (Sizuoka) in 2012;  “gazetteer” at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art (Hiroshima), and more. Recent major group exhibitions include “Artist File 2011―NACT Annual Show of Contemporary Art” at the National Art Center Tokyo in 2011; “Aomori Earth” at the Aomori Museum of Art in 2014; “City and Nature” at Sapporo International Art Festival 2014; a traveling exhibition “Local Emotion” at the Museum Haus Konstruktiv (Switzerland), Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow MOCAK (Poland), and the Kunstmuseum Moritzburg Halle (Saale)(Germany) in 2014; “A Bird’s-eye View of the World” at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art in 2015; “Weather Report” at the Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts in 2018; a traveling exhibition ”To Travel With Glasses” at the Aomori Museum of Art (Aomori), the Iwami Art Museum (Shimane), and the Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art (Shizuoka); and more. He has participated in many solo and group exhibitions and art festivals domestically and internationally. His works are also in the collection of The National Museum of Modern Art (Tokyo), The National Museum of Art (Osaka), The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (USA), and many other museums in Japan and abroad.

Cooperation: Mori Building Co., Ltd.
We would like to take this opportunity to thank all the people involved in Mori Building Co., Ltd. for their support for this solo exhibition, “makietaTYO. Thank you very much.

Related exhibition: “makietaCC”
Tokyo Photographic Art Museum
Tuesday, November 20, 2021 – Sunday, January 23, 2022
Museum Hours: 10:00-18:00 Tue. – Sun.  (10:00-20:00 on Thu. and Fri.)
Closed on Mon., and New Year’s holidays(12/28-1/4, temporary open on 1/2 and 1/3)

“makietaTYO”

Makieta means model or diorama in Polish.
Taiji Matsue, after visiting Poland for research in 2016 and seeing it’s large city model, re-acknowledged its’ potential as a subject of portrait.
Matsue’s solo exhibition “makietaCC”, which begins on November 9th, 2021 at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, will also display photographs of large city models that were produced later on. In conjunction with this exhibition, which will be Matsue’s first solo exhibition at a public art museum in Tokyo, TARO NASU will hold a new solo exhibition “makietaTYO” with about 20 works of Tokyo.

A large diorama of Tokyo, being reduced to 1/1000 of its’ actual size, was chosen as the “shooting location”.
This “model of Tokyo” that the Mori Building has been building, accurately reproduces the present 13 wards in Tokyo, centering on Minato ward. If the viewer’s height is 160 cm, they will experience the wide view of Tokyo from 1600m high right beneath their eyes. In addition, climbing up to the platform which stands next to the city model, as Matsue did at the time of shooting, will add another 500m of height of view in high sky. For Matsue, who regards a landscape as a “collection of information of ground surface”, and has reformed this into the form of work of precision as a “specimen of ground surface” with his original techniques, this giant model with every detail precisely manufactured was a fascinating subject.

He takes high-resolution photographs that are impossible to take with an aerial photography, on a scale that should only be taken from the height of an aerial photography.
Through the finder, the viewer will witness dense houses, shopping streets, narrow alleys and green areas that look like they were embedded between them, forested skyscrapers and surrounding highways, and a railway network that widely spreads across Tokyo.
There is a fusion of scale and detail accurately reproducing even the detailed information, that would otherwise be lost due to the height of the viewpoint, which only can be realized through the method of photographing a city model. A view of Tokyo which can only be seen in Matsue’s work, invites the viewer to see deeper into the depths of the megacity of Tokyo.