Silver Haikus: Asia photographed by Michael Kenna

This book explores Michael Kenna’s minimalist photography and its deep connections to Asian art and philosophy.

Photographer Michael Kenna, internationally renowned as one of the contemporary masters of minimalist photography, has a deep attachment to Asia. Since his first visit to Japan in 1987, he has returned time and time again to capture the continent’s landscapes, examining them with his own distinctive, recognisable eye. What’s more, these numerous trips to Asia have had a significant impact on Michael Kenna’s photography.

This book provides a thematic retrospective of Michael Kenna’s work in Asia over the last 40 years. It explores the connection between his aesthetic and Asian art through formal dialogues between his photographs and works from the Chinese, Korean and Japanese collections of the Musée Guimet. More specifically, this book observes the influenceof Asian arts in the photographer’s work, which is first and foremost stylistic: the choice of monochrome, the economy of means, the use of emptiness and the desire to suggest rather than describe evoke the ink paintings of Chinese scholars and Japanese Zen monks. It is also philosophical, with the same acceptance of slowness, the quest for perfection, the repetition of motifs, the asceticism of work and the spiritual dimension.

Review

Exquisite.--Viola Raikhel "T Magazine: Australia"

About the Author

Édouard de Saint Ours is curator of photographic collections at the Musée Guimet in Paris and curator of the exhibition.

Haely Chang is curator of Asian art at the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth.