CHANEL NEXUS HALL

Established in 2004, Birdhead—the Shanghai-based duo that consists of Song Tao (b. 1979) and Ji Weiyu (b. 1980)—initially gained renown for their expansive photographic chronicles of their city’s ongoing regeneration. Over the course of two decades, they have continued to push photography to rhapsodize, critique, and celebrate the world that has come to exist around them. If their early works were about cataloguing a rapid and all-consuming process of urbanization, their more recent creation has, in keeping with Kyotographie’s 2024 theme, returned to the “Source” of the photographic medium, specifically its relationship to its fundamental elements of light and time. By testing the limits of traditional photographic tools and practices, they find a precarious balance between representation and abstraction.

This exhibition, Birdhead’s first in Kyoto, aims to present their unique photographic practice to a new audience by focusing on three key bodies of work: the Matrix series of photographic assemblages, which comprise large grids of printed images affixed directly to the wall, allowing unlikely visual patterns and rhymes to emerge; the For a Bigger Photo series in which they print photographs without using paper, by transferring light and shadow directly onto wood and lacquer using special processes which they have developed through years of research; and finally an installation in which pinwheels made from photographic negatives interact directly with a light source, creating an environment of random, poetic projections. Taking place in the historic architectural spaces of the Kondaya Genbei atelier, the exhibition returns us to the source of one of the most original artistic voices to come out of China in the twenty-first century.