Artissima: Solo show w/ Masaki Nakayama

Born in 1944 in Yamanashi Prefecture
Graduated from Komagome High School
Represented by Galerie Christophe Gaillard and Yumiko Chiba Associates

After making wood sculptures for several years, Nakayama started creating series of works titled ‘Body Scale’ which combined photographs of himself and solid abjects. The works in the series were underpinned by his eagerness to approach the world through his own body and basically consisted of three elements of: a photograph of the artist engaged in a specifie action; an abject which corresponds to the action; and the formai structure which mediates the action and the abject. His work addressed the issues of spatial correspondences and differences that these three elements yielded. ln the 1980’s, Nakayama created the works that combined a photograph of a body in movement taken with multiple exposures and an object. ln them, the body appeared not as an object but as something metaphorical. Consequently, his works of the 90’s employed photography  as  its  sole  medium  and  yielded  the  overlapping  images  of  a  moving  body resembling a blurred illuminant and the Mondrian paintings or the remains of Borobudur, by which he achieved a broad perspective that may simulate historicity and sociality. By use of the medium of photography, Nakayama’s work escapes from falling into the category of object or performance art. lnstead, they are oriented towards the presentation of the motions of the world that cannot be represented through imagery.

[Hayami Takashi. (1994) ‘NAKAYAMA Masaki’ Bijyutsu Techo. (January), p.102 ]