Shuzo Takechi

Since 2021, I have been working primarily with photography.

I wish to stand before what lies “prior to the sign.”
Yet I understand that even if it can be touched as bodily sensation, the moment it rises into consciousness as perception, it is already drawn into the realm of the sign.
For this reason, I take the paradoxical position of “conveying the sign itself, in order to present the impossibility of escaping it.”
As subjects, I choose things whose sign-character is as weak as possible.
Strong signs immediately pull the viewer’s perception into familiar meanings, while weak signs keep the viewer in a state of “just seeing.”
──overlapping lines, boundaries, fragments──
These do not lend themselves to immediate classification by names or meanings; instead, they hold the viewer in the state of “just seeing” and bring perception itself to the surface.
Through a practice of “weakened signification,” I continue to explore a drive toward what lies before the sign—
just as painting once manifested its own materiality, and Mono-ha revealed materials in their unaltered presence.
To accept that signs are inescapable, and yet to go on recording an orientation toward their outside—
that is my work.

2005
MFA in Oil Painting, Graduate School of Art and Design, Joshibi University of Art and Design, Japan

1997
BFA in Oil Painting, Faculty of Art and Design, Tama Art University, Japan

solo show

2024 Nizhniy Tagil State Museum of Fine Arts, Nizhny Tagil, Russia (photograph)​
2024 Space Place Gallery, Nizhny Tagil, Russia (photograph)

group show
2009 Gallery b.Tokyo, Kyobashi, Japan (Oil Painting)
2008 Gallery b.Tokyo, Kyobashi, Japan (Oil Painting)
2004 Gallery Seira, Ginza, Japan (Oil Painting)
2003 Gallery Seira, Ginza, Japan (Oil Painting)
2000 Bokushin Gallery, Ginza, Japan (Acrylic Painting etc)
1999 Gallery Mirage, Shibuya, Japan (Performance)
1999 Bokushin Gallery, Ginza, Japan (Acrylic Painting etc)
1998 Tokyo Zokei University Museum, Hachioji, Japan (installation)