2015 | Mesh Tights

Mesh Tights: Daido Moriyama

Organizer: Three Shadows +3 Gallery · Xiamen

Co-organizer: Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation, Akio Nagasawa Gallery

Exhibition Dates: November 15, 2015 to February 16, 2016

Address: No. 303，476 Xinglinwan Road, Jimei, Xiamen, China

“Mesh Tights: Daido Moriyama” will be exhibited at Three Shadows +3 Gallery · Xiamen from November 15, 2015 to February 16, 2016. As the first exhibition at Three Shadows +3 Gallery · Xiamen, the exhibition will present 22 silver gelatin prints from Daido Moriyama’s “Mesh” series.

Daido Moriyama (b. 1938) has focused on expressing personal psychological states. The strong visual effect created by the unique granulation of his works give his images a distinctive ambience. He tried his utmost to eliminate the concepts and languages of photography, and he examines photography by communicating physiological and perceptual information. Within this range, his photography is simple and sincere, without technical restrictions; he pursues free, simple photography. This series was a landmark in Moriyama’s career. The fishnet stockings fill the entirety of the frame and the viewer’s line of sight. The close-ups of legs in fishnets are sensory explorations of texture and hard-edge abstraction, which focus the viewer’s attention on surface elements that might otherwise be ignored. These fragmentary portraits of thighs and stockings represent a sexual instinct, which is faintly discernible under the ambiguous cover.

Daido Moriyama’s works have been widely collected by public institutions and private collections, including the Museum of Modern Art (USA), SFMoMA (USA), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (USA), the Getty Museum (USA), the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (USA), and the Centre Pompidou (France). Daido Moriyama has held more than one hundred solo exhibitions around the world at institutions such as SFMoMA (USA), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (USA), Fondation Cartier (France), Fotomuseum Winterthur (Switzerland), the Museum Folkwang (Germany), the National Museum of Art Osaka (Japan), and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography (Japan). In May 2012, Daido Moriyama won the Lifetime Achievement Award at the twenty-eighth ICP Infinity Awards.

Three Shadows +3 Gallery is a strategic partner of the Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation. In June 2015, “Dazai: Daido Moriyama” was held at Three Shadows +3 Gallery, as a prelude to the traveling exhibition by the same name. The “Mesh Tights” exhibition at +3 Gallery · Xiamen echoes the exhibition “Fragments” at Three Shadows Photography Art Centre Xiamen and adds to the “2015 Jimei × Arles: Encounters between East and West – International Photo Festival.”

Three Shadows +3 Gallery · Xiamen was established in November 2015, located in Xinglin Harbor on Yundang Lake in Jimei District. It will serve as the Xiamen branch of +3 Gallery.

As a strategic extension of +3 Gallery, the Xiamen branch will focus on presenting the best of international contemporary art from around the world and promoting dialogue and collaboration between art institutions, curators, critics, and collectors. The gallery will present artworks that incorporate media such as photography, painting, sculpture, and craft.

The +3 Gallery · Xiamen will serve as a southern complement to the gallery’s headquarters in Beijing. The gallery will promote the development of contemporary art in China; with a farsighted and open attitude, the gallery will concentrate cultural and artistic resources from all corners of society, encourage the presentation of various artistic media in a wider range of contexts, and promote the further development of Chinese contemporary art.

Daido Moriyama (Photographer) was born in 1938 in Osaka, Japan. After working as an assistant for Takeji Iwamiya and Eikoh Hosoe, he became a freelance photographer in 1964. His photobooks include Japan, a Photo Theater (1968), Farewell Photography (1972), Hunter (1972), and Light & Shadow. (1982). He has held solo exhibitions at SFMoMA (1999), Fondation Cartier (2003), the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography (2008), the National Museum of Art, Osaka (2011), the Tate Modern (2012), and the Okinawa Prefectural Museum & Art Museum (2014).