Yuki Tawada: Water Fire

Yuki Tawada is an artist who radically expands the possibilities of photographic expression by challenging the photograph as a physical object through processes such as scraping and burning.

This book is the first mid-career retrospective of Tawada’s work, bringing together, series by series, nearly twenty years of her practice, from her earliest works to her most recent projects. In WHITE OUT, Tawada spends months rubbing and scraping the surfaces of large-scale photographic prints depicting crowds and cities with erasers and needles—not to erase the image, but to touch the unseen force within it. In I am in You, Tawada and her mother, who live apart, work with the same photograph of waves in their separate places, burning only the areas of water with a heated drawing tool. Through this process, personal memory opens outward into the time of the family and the memories of others. Through such physical interventions into the photograph, Tawada approaches the realms of individual and collective unconscious, memory, and emotion.

In recent years, Tawada has extended this practice into ceramics through her collaboration with ceramic artist Fuku Fukumoto. In Lachrymatory, photographic ash—the remains of photographs burned by participants—is turned into glaze and fused into the surface of vessels. Through processes involving photographic transfer, bodily traces, clay, water, fire, and firing, Tawada approaches photography not simply as an image, but as something that can disappear, transform, and pass into other forms of matter. The collaborative ceramic works further explore photography as something that continues to transform within clay, water, fire, and gravity.

The book includes Tawada’s own concept texts for each series, as well as essays by Pauline Vermare, Curator of Photography at the Brooklyn Museum, and art historian and critic Toshiharu Ito.

Every copy of the first edition is individually numbered and signed by the artist. On the endpapers, the I am in You image has been individually burned by Tawada and several collaborators using a heated drawing tool, leaving a different trace in every copy.


Texts: Toshiharu Ito, Pauline Vermare
Interviewer: Shunsuke Kimura

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