LOKO GALLERY is pleased to announce the solo exhibition of Shingo Yoshida. The artist has been living and working in Europe for over 20 years and has gained appreciation with his elaborately made video works that pursue self-awareness in extreme situations but also including mundane situations.

In this solo exhibition, after a 10 years interval in Japan, he traces and reconstructs a story about the erection of a monument that the artist’s father and grandfather were deeply engaged in.

The exhibition is held as the partnership program of The Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions.

There are over 300,000 Mt. Fuji climbers every year, but very few of them are noticed at a stone monument built on the top of the mountain, Kengamine, just beside the closed meteorological station.
The monument, consisting of a body and a pedestal, is inscribed with Haiku poems and stands about the height of an adult’s chest. Haiku poets Seishi Yamaguchi(山口誓子), who worked on the legendary haiku magazine,” Hototogisu” and his friends, Hokusyushi(北舟子), Hatsume(波津女), and Sofu(霜楓) all have works inscribed on the monument.The monument is standing on the west of the crater, overlooking Osawa collapse valley. It is made of andesite and must weigh hundreds of kilograms.
The slope of Fuji, which rises slowly from the foot of the mountain and becomes a cliff near the summit, causes many casualties every year due to slipping and rockfalls.
It’s easy to imagine that bringing a megalith to the summit and setting it up would be a precarious task but it was the dream of Hokusyushi, the promoter of the project, to build it at the best place in Japan.
In the early morning of August 20, 1974, at the Fuji Gotemba fifth station, Yoshida Nansyushi, who inherited his father’s dream, looked up at the distant summit enshrouded in a thick cloud.

Shingo Yoshida
Born in Tokyo in 1974. Studied at Villa Arson, Nice National Fine Arts School, France, from 1999 to 2004, graduated with highest honors. Completed M.A. at the Graduate School of Fine Arts, Lyon, France in 2005.
In 2007, in the Program La Seine of Ecole Nationale Supérieure des BeauxArts de Paris.
Since 2003, he has been participating in international exhibitions around the world. “Palais de Tokyo Paris” “National Museum of Contemporary Art” “ARTE tv Creative” France / Germany
“60th Oberhausen International Short Film Festival” “Based in Berlin” by Klaus Biesenbach, Christine Macel, Hans Ulrich Obrist
2017 “UN Conference on Climate Change, COP23” Films and photographs produced in Siberia, Russia, were invited from the 23rd Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
Later, the photographic work is held as an art collection by the German Federal Ministry of the Environment, Berlin and Germany.
In 2016, the video works are acquired by museums such as Berlin-Berlinische Galerie-Akademie der Künste-Fluentum.

Artist Website
https://www.shingoyoshida.com/

The Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2020
THE IMAGINATION OF TIME
Partnership Program

Artist talk
Feb. 15 (Sat) 18:00 ‒
Guest:
Hitoshi Nakano / Curator of the Kanagawa Arts Foundation

ARTIST PROFILE: Shingo Yoshida