Shimiya trained in Touken (sword fighting), Iai, and Zentoudou at the Musoukan, mastering the iron willpower and the fighting spirit as a swordsman through martial arts demonstrations and tough matches.

He is challenging creative activities with insights and observation eye cultivated through sword fights besides the aesthetic sense that glares at the new frontiers of beauty.

In recent years, he has received the martial name “Jinba” from his master, and achieved the creation of a new school called “Gekitou”.

 

WORKS

ARTIST STATEMENT

“A Flower Rising to Heaven” is my first photographic project that is to experience perspective between life and death.

Over the last quarter century having been as a swordsman, my work has fallen into the expression, based on the Zen-style mood, supported by insight, observation, and sense of beauty from the intensive practice of swordsmanship and iai (technique of drawing a sword).

I have faced “life and death” between the moments with my swords. Or, by feeling instinctively such concept, I create in my own sensitivity that touches the other’s view of life and death.  

It goes without saying that “wabi-sabi which stands for beauty within simplicity and imperfection” lurking in my work come from swordsmanship.  

A series of work, titled “A Flower Rising to Heaven” was born on August 26th, 2017 in conjunction with my mother’s passing.

I got an inspiration from offering flowers to my mother who was laid in a coffin. And, I attempted to photograph something unseen in a series of “Sublimation of Soul”.

This body of work connotes not only a rhyme in a poem that engenders serenity but also a tense atmosphere that questions someone’s opinion of life and death by pointing a blade edge to the viewer’s throat.

A flame is an element and it is also a material.

What embodies paraphrased form of flowers that rising to heaven by the flames is something like removing a sword from a scabbard at iai technique.  And, I take a method of photographic expression in order to grasp the moment of space-time.

I imagine to create as if burning flowers run side by side with souls as an offering to the deceased.

Such stream is reminiscent of the aspect which the numinous soul of human-beings elevating to the heaven.

When I found fluctuation of flame in sublimation, observing where the soul is heading to, I obtained a very primitive and immutable experience.

I cannot imagine anything beautiful other than fluctuation of the flame that is resonant with instincts to mankind.

Something always in common within my work carries “fluctuation within 1f”.

The flame has a strong contrast of dark and light and graduation of colors.  That is to say that you can see maculation there.  I feel fluctuation in such rhythmical maculation.

The flame carries unpredictable and irregular “fluctuation”, and that is what I positively believe “fluctuation within 1f”.

The harmony state between regular and irregular is “fluctuation within 1f”.  That makes the viewer comfortable.

Since the “fluctuation within 1f” is sensitivity that human-beings feel instinctively beautiful, that brings the sense of continuous observation and healing effect to the viewers.

I would like to make a ceaseless challenge on the theme of “Flower Rising to Heaven “ that depicts the moment of fluctuation between the forms of flowers rising to heaven and flames for my lifework.

ARTIST WEBSITE

Shogo Shimiya

 

 

 

 

AVAILABLE WORKS

 

 

 

 

 

ALL
Andy Warhol
Jean-Michel Basquiat
Rob Pruitt
Robert Longo
Rammellzee
Pablo Picasso
Edvard Munch
Andi Fischer
Bel Fullana
Helmut Newton
Robert Mapplethorpe
Richard Avedon
Alison Jackson
Guido Argentini
Antonio Redaelli
Nobuyoshi Araki
Noritoshi Hirakawa
Katsuhiko Brian Sato
Makoto Saito