
Mnemosyne
- Publisher
- HeHe
- Year
- 2021
- ISBN
- 9784908062346
- Specifications
- Softcover
Size: 257 x 182 mm
Pages: 156
Language: Japanese + English
Photographs by: Yasuhide Kuge
Text by: Kei Wakabayashi
Design by: Manabu Okamoto
Translation by: Yuka Katagiri
Ten years after Atelier, his book on the studios where artists make their work, Yasuhide Kuge met two performers, Norico Sunayama (Dumb Type) and Nakao Ikemiya (Nomad-s), and began this new series. It pictorially transforms the moments when physical expression takes shape and freely crosses the memory of the nude body from past to future. Mnemosyne is the goddess of memory in Greek mythology and the mother of the Muses.
Kuge writes that when the lockdown restrictions eased he resumed his visits to artists' studios and ended up photographing performances: during the pandemic, when he felt suffocated, as if his body were stiffening, the performers showed him moments in which various physical expressions are formed. As it has become easier to go back and forth between ideas and techniques, he can now create the texture of the work from a point that was previously unreachable. The book includes a contribution by the editor Kei Wakabayashi, 'But no, if I don't budge, I rot where I am'.