20th Century Exhibitions

Japanese Woman Photographers: From 1950s to Now at The Photography Gallery presents a long-overdue celebration of the groundbreaking Japanese women who have helped shape photography. Showcasing 200 works by 27 artists across 3 floors, the exhibition challenges a historically male-dominated photographic canon, instead foregrounding female perspectives and the varied ways women have used photography to examine the world around them. Rather than presenting a single movement or style, the exhibition’s strength lies in the diversity of its artists and approaches.

The exhibition opens with the political unrest of the 1950s-70s. Wantanabe Hitomi documented the violent student protests and occupation of Tokyo’s campus in 1968-69. Her photographs offer a rare female perspective on a pivotal moment in postwar Japanese history.

Ishikawa Mao similarly photographed life outside mainstream social conventions. Her experience as a hostess in Okinawa gave her access to intimate scenes of nightlife and relationships. Okinawa’s role as a US military base also features in her photos reflecting on geopolitics and military presence.

By the 1980s, women increasingly challenged conventional expectations of gender and domestic life. The 1985 Equal Employment Law promoted gender equality yet prejudice was still rife. Miwa Yanagi’s work confronts societal misogyny. Her White Casket series features ‘elevator girls’ dressed in standardized uniforms, their near-identical appearances rendering them anonymous. The women eerily illustrate the suppression of individuality within a consumer-driven society.

Nagashima Yurie’s photography turns inwards, using self-portraiture to challenge traditional representations of femininity and motherhood. The image of herself pregnant, cigarette in hand and middle finger raised is an unapologetic rejection of idealized motherhood.

Ultimately, the illuminating exhibition significantly broadens Japanese photographic history. Its ambition, however, is also its greatest weakness. Covering 7 decades and 27 artists, it can feel overwhelming. Nevertheless, the exhibition succeeds in demonstrating the extraordinary diversity of Japanese women’s photography.

Raw, confessional and radical, Tracey Emin: A Second Life at Tate Modern is one of the most emotionally uncompromising exhibitions I’ve seen in a long time. 

Spanning four decades, this major retrospective brings together painting, video, neon, textiles, writing, sculpture and installation, revealing the extraordinary breadth of Emin’s practice. Throughout, the boundary between art and life is continually blurred.

From the outset, the exhibition foregrounds the intensely autobiographical nature of Emin’s work. Following a traumatic abortion and what she described as an ‘emotional suicide’, Emin destroyed many of her early works. Her eventual return to art marked a crucial shift, her practice could no longer exist separately from her life

This relationship between trauma and artistic production runs throughout the exhibition. The videos Why I Never Became a Dancer and How It Feels are particularly powerful. The former revisits Emin’s adolescence in Margate and the misogyny and sexual exploitation that shaped her early life while How it Feels offers an even more harrowing account of bodily trauma, loss and her near-fatal abortion experience.

Throughout the exhibition, ordinary objects become emotionally charged. It’s Not the Way I Want to Die transforms an architectural structure into a meditation on mortality while My Abortion uses a hospital wristband, pain medication and children’s shoes to evoke a deeply painful memory. Emin undoubtably seeks to provoke, but provocation is rarely an end in itself. Instead artistic production becomes a means through which trauma can be confronted, memorialized and perhaps temporarily exorcised.

My Bed is a major highlight. Once dismissed as a ‘squalid affront’, the Turner Prize-nominated installation has become one of the defining works of contemporary British art. By placing her unmade bed within the museum, Emin radically collapses the boundary between public and private while challenging conventional ideas of artistic value. 

A Second Life offers little emotional reprieve, but this is precisely its power. Emin’s exploration of sexuality, trauma and mortality results in work that is at once deeply personal and profoundly universal.

The Hayward Gallery’s joint exhibition of Chiharu Shiota’s Threads of Life and Yin Xiuzhen: Heart to Heart offered a relaxing if somewhat lacking display.  An expansion upon her lauded 2015 Japan Pavilion at the Venice, the Hayward Gallery feature’s Chiharu’s famous The Key in The Hand installation smaller in scale from the previous 180,000 to just 20,000 keys hanging from red threads.  The open doorway in the center of the room offers an interesting opportunity to reflect/ponder on the concept of which of these memories fits the doors lock.  The keys evoking memories and journeys caught up in a tangled web of threads that cannot be extracted/extracated.  However, in practice the Hayward Gallery I believe missed the mark in evoking/teasing out these potentially more thought provoking discussions.  The limited details/panels tease/superficially refer to larger concepts of transforming spaces ‘concrete yet deeply felt’ but lack any substantial information about the artist, her influences or more concretely the associations of such artworks that would have benefited the public.  Instead the spaces were awash with instagramable spots and ‘aesthetic’ pictures that potentially missed the larger message/concept.  Perhaps the most emotionally touching/thought provoking part of the exhibition was Chiharu’s Letters of Thanks 2026 comprising letters from strangers around the world offering gratitude to whomever.  But again one can only wonder if more could have been eked out from such a thought provoking display.  Only when talking with the staff did I learn of the exhibits ephemerality that it will be destroyed upon the exhibits end though half will be able to be recycled.  This fact adds I believe a beautiful delicacy to the letters of gratitude that was a missed opportunity at the Hayward. 

Chiharu Shiota’s Threads of Life exhibition at the Hayward Gallery missed the mark in its empty display.  An expansion upon her much lauded 2015 Japan Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Chiharu reimagines The Key in the Hand into a smaller scale installation with 20,000 hanging keys.  The replacement of a boat in her 2015 iteration with old wooden double doors in the room’s center seemed a fitting and poetic decision complimenting the hanging keys.  Where the Hayward misstepped is their failure to elucidate and provoke further meaning from Chiharu’s thought provoking artworks.  The text panels offer superficial illusions to memories and the cycle of life but missed the opportunity to provide more concrete information about the artist, her cultural influences, the difficulties working within the space and the artworks’ ephemerality (after the exhibitions’ run the work will be dismantled and largely disposed of).  For me, these details encouraged a larger appreciation of the work’s meaning.  

The Hayward was able to get away with her Letters of Thanks work which for all intents and purposes was self explanatory as it featured strangers’ letters of gratitude hanging from the ceiling.  But the repeated lack of information throughout I feel encouraged a disappointing competition to get the best aesthetic ‘pic’ rather than seeking a deeper meaning.  However, one can’t fault the public in this instance.

The exhibition’s run ends this weekend on the 3rd of May.

Part of a joint exhibition, Yin Xiuzhen: Heart to Heart at the Hayward Gallery provided a touching exploration of the artist’s culture and tradition. A Beijing native, Xiuzhen’s works intimately engaged with her hometown. Beijing Opera 2002 featured pictures of life in Beijing’s Houhai neighborhood plastered across the walls.  The various people playing games, singing Peking Opera songs and observing passerbys was beautifully complimented by the humble stools and chairs scattered across the floor. The nostalgia for a more peaceful, collective community instead of the hustle and bustle of modern life shone through. Her 2007 Collective Subconscious (Blue) similarly encouraged viewers to engage with memory and community.  The unpretentious minibus’ speakers blast Wang Feng’s Beijing Beijing whose lyrics recall an ideal 1990s Beijing.  Made from 400 pieces of clothing, the elongated minibus encourages the viewer to think of their own lives and personal journeys.  Her International Flight and ongoing series, Portable Cities, made from second hand clothes, addresses globalization and suggests that no matter where one travels they take their identity and country with them. Her latest ‘London’ suitcase was made from Hayward Gallery employees’ clothes. The decision to cleverly reinforce the airport allusion by having flight announcements quietly repeat in the background and luggage trollies neatly lined up beside the displays was well done.   

Her newly commissioned Heart to Heart installation (part of her ongoing Cavity series) provided a culmination of Xiuzhen’s message.  The large walk-in sculpture of a heart made from red clothes mounted on a metal frame cultivates the uncanny.  This unsettling feeling however ebbs away as one walks inside.  A sense of calm and peace envelops one as the pillows across the floor encourage you to lie down and familiarize oneself with yourself as well as the collective memories embedded in the clothes around you.  The Hayward has done an admirable job of illustrating Xiuzhen’s work.  Her themes of identity, the individual and the collective shine through as well as the importance of own’s hometown amidst a rapidly changing world.