KVT – A River Flows through

Haiku-like too are Jamie’s backlit photographs flowing in a horizontal line around the walls…at times they eddy in still quiet places or meander silently amongst posed people. Then they leap and flurry before calming. These portraits of a city invite you into their depths. They don’t pose complicated questions but they encourage the viewer to make up their own casual stories. In both film and photograph we come to the image of a half naked man standing under a tree, staring at the viewer. Sinister or innocent? The photographs are engagingly ambiguous. I also like the ambiguity of not knowing if the images have been deliberately composed or not. They have that air of deliberated haiku about them and their pattern around the wall can be likened to poetic meters or musical notation.

Too hard to have favorites…first the haiku on a lone bike was the one….then the series of formal posed portraits….then the cleaners in the park..then……

Jamie’s photographs add many new threads to Thi’s documentation and expand our understanding of their mapping of the city as they wander it…parents and child.

I kept wondering what the effect would be if Jamie’s images were exhibited in very large format…whether this would deprive them of their tightly constructed poetry. Be interesting to find out! They’d still retain an inviting, sometimes delightfully old-fashioned, inner glow (no pun intended) that would distinguish them…perhaps the word images they’d provoke would be more tanka than haiku!

At present the same gallery at the Japan Foundation house both video and photographs so it’s easy to be immersed in both. I liked it much better than being too far removed as we were on the opening night. But I wonder what it’d be like to have Thi’s work shown on a big screen in an immediately adjoining space. The poetic visuals would certainly shine through.

Excellent exhibition that I’ll wander in to see a few more times…particularly if I can have it all to myself again. It combines beauty and intellect which I’ve always found is a feature of both artists’ individual work.

Apologies to the artists if my opinion making has diverged too far from their intent…

And thanks, again this year, to the Japan Foundation.

PS: Thi’s film “Jo Ha Kyu” was screened in the International Competition at the Oberhausen International Short Film Festival last week.