It was a day of cool weekend of August. I visited Vangi Sculpture Garden Museum, where Rinko Kawauchi’s solo exhibition “Cui Cui” is held. “Cui Cui” has already released as a photographic collection and a slideshow, but this is the first time it is shown as an exhibition.

© Rinko Kawauchi

The show exhibits the series of photographs that she has shot her family from 1992 to 2005. It documents an ordinary family life, birth and death which everyone of us has to experience.
The show space is located at a stairwell of the museum and it is structured by two sunlit rooms and a narrow path between those. The wall of the room is concrete and artificial, and it signalizes the warmth of the works.

I walks through one room to the another.
Sunlight fills the room softly. Time flows slowly. Two hands are held in a photograph. I listen the sound of something is stroking a chord with me.

There is no lively bound that I feel from her photographs. Those are very calm and quiet. Although her works are filled with something gently floating and something certain. I am drawn toward it.

© Rinko Kawauchi

The narrow path that lead us under gentle sunlight. Strength and fragilely of this season. Everything of those seemed perfectly structured to surround her works and I naturally started to think. Think about time, life, and family.

When I left the museum, a slight rain started to drizzle. I was thinking to come back again before the summer ends.

Rinko Kawauchi Exhibition “Cui Cui”
Date: July 12th – September 9th, 2008
Place: Vangi Sculpture Garden Museum
Address: 347-1 Clematis-no-Oka, Nagaizumi-cho, Shizuoka
Tel: 055-989-8787
https://www.vangi-museum.jp

Text: Yutaka Takamura
Translation: Shiori Saito