KANA KAWANISHI PHOTOGRAPHY is pleased to present “The Righteous Place,” a solo exhibition by Hiroshi Ono starting Friday, August 9th, 2024.

 

Hiroshi Ono is a photographer living in Amsterdam. In his first book, “Line on the Earth” (Edición Iman, 2007), he traveled to over 50 countries and connected the divided grounds of dystopias he confronted as one road. The scenes described in the book included, for example, the shocking sight of crossing the Afghan border wall (even visa holders were instructed to climb the wall because the slightest opening of the border would result in an avalanche of prospective immigrants), a restaurant in Belgrade during the civil war (prices were re-written every 30 minutes due to hyperinflation, and if you didn’t pay when you ordered, you didn’t know what price it would be when you’d finish eating it), and chatting with a survivor at the site of the Rwandan genocide (in front of many white bones, the survivor laughingly told him, “I survived because I was fast on my feet”).

 

In his second book, “The Small Feasts Make the World” (Mochuisle, 2012), he introduced landscapes in the Netherlands and Japan on the equal vision of hope, consisting of essays about his frustrating everyday life in the oppressed Tokyo, and diaries of his peaceful days in Amsterdam where people from varied nations and backgrounds are naturally accepted as is. His unique and humorous point of view allowed not only the cultural differences between the Netherlands and Japan to appear but also the essential cores that humans share, regardless of one’s cultural sphere.

 

In his new work, “The Righteousness Place,” which will be presented at this exhibition, Ono presents a serene bird’s-eye view of the landscapes he has photographed over a period of five years around the world. Today, when justice is being pretended all over the world, the multilayered divisions are worsening, memories of past despair are forgotten, and conflicts and suffocation seem to be running through the world at an accelerating pace, Ono’s straightforward viewpoint will flatly juxtapose the world.

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We cordially invite all to this exhibition, which will help us reexamine the concepts of “righteousness” and “correctness,” which are said to have been developed by humans for the survival of the species in this time of deepening confusion.

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