M+B is pleased to present the West Coast premiere exhibition of Japanese photographer Kohei Yoshiyuki’s The Park. Shot in three Tokyo parks during the early seventies, The Park is a series of black and white photographs capturing couples meeting up for clandestine trysts and, more provocatively, the voyeurs who came out to watch them. First exhibited in 1979 at Komai Gallery in Tokyo, the uproar surrounding his methods caused these photographs to be hidden from the public for the next 28 years. The Los Angeles exhibition opens on March 13, 2010 with an opening reception from 6 to 8p and will run through April 17, 2010. A monograph of the same name published by Hatje Cantz and Yossi Milo Gallery will accompany the exhibition and includes an original essay by Vince Aletti, along with an interview conducted by Nobuyoshi Araki that first appeared in a 1980 monograph of Yoshiyuki’s work.
Mr. Yoshiyuki first stumbled upon this hidden world while photographing skyscrapers in front of Chuo Park in Shinjuku at night when he witnessed a couple having sex and quickly discovered an entire scene of young lovers—and their peepers. He soon returned with an inconspicuous 35mm camera, a filtered flash and infrared film, and began shooting these hetero- and homosexual couplings, along with their spectators lurking in the bushes.
What is particularly striking about this series of photographs is not the graphic nature of the sexual acts portrayed, which are usually obscured by other figures or occur out of frame, but the densely packed tableaux of voyeurs who crowd in on the couples and sometimes attempt to join in. The raw, snapshot-like quality of these images implicates photographer, viewer and subject, which makes this work especially poignant and intriguing. In the tradition of Walker Evans on the New York subway or Weegee’s photographs of couples in the movie theatre, Yoshiyuki’s The Park is a social documentary of Japan in the 1970s that is rarely seen or heard of, as well as being a comment on photography itself. As Martin Parr writes in The Photobook: A History, Volume II, “The Park is a brilliant piece of social documentation, capturing perfectly the loneliness, sadness and desperation that so often accompany sexual or human relationships in a big, hard metropolis like Tokyo."
The exhibition will also include photographs from Yoshiyuki’s 1978 companion project, Love Hotel, a group of video stills pulled from unerased videotapes made by clients of one of Japan’s infamous rooms-by-the-hour hotels. The resulting pictures are grainy abstractions of faceless, nameless people caught, mid-act, in lovemaking.
Kohei Yoshiyuki was born in 1946 in Japan, where he currently lives and works. Photographs from The Park series have been acquired by the Brooklyn Museum, Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago), Museum of Fine Arts (Houston), Museum of Modern Art (New York), North Carolina Museum of Art (Raleigh) and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. This will be his first exhibition with M+B.