Rinko Kawauchi’s first museum exhibition in the United States shows why she’s one of the most important and popular female photographers working in Japan today. Kawauchi’s unique installation of photographs at the MIA capture ordinary, fleeting moments of light and daily life, the photographs evoking everything from wonderment to the grotesque. A picture of a child breastfeeding. Ants carrying a grain of sugar. A tiny chrysalis on a blade of grass. She views the world with a playful, thought-provoking, and critically detached curiosity.

 

Kawauchi is also well known for her photography books, which present an evocative sequence of images unfolding on every spread. She has produced 15 photo books since 2001, including Light and Shadow (2012) and Illuminance, Ametsuchi, Seeing Shadow (2012). Now living and working in Tokyo, Kawauchi has exhibited around the world, including a recent solo exhibition at the prestigious Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography in 2012.

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New Pictures 9: Rinko Kawauchi from the Minneapolis Institute of Art.