EXHIBITIONS
Toshiya Murakoshi “When Silence Learned to Breathe”
Dates: Dec 19, 2025 – Jan 31, 2026
[Winter Holidays: Dec 27, 2025 – Jan 6, 2026]
Location: Taka Ishii Gallery Photography / Film
Opening reception: Friday, Dec 19, 18:00 – 20:00
Taka Ishii Gallery Photography / Film is pleased to present When Silence Learned to Breathe, a solo exhibition of the work of Toshiya Murakoshi, from Friday, December 19, 2025 through Saturday, January 31, 2026. The show features the latest photographs from a series he has continued to shoot in his home prefecture of Fukushima since 2011. Following Player & Bark, Burn After Seeing, An Eventual Saturation, The Wind Prays for Sublime Stillness, this fifth series comprises 15 photographs taken between January 2019 and December 2020.
The nuclear accident triggered by the earthquake and tsunami of March 2011 released radioactive materials, confronting us with the presence in our environment of substances imperceptible to our senses. It also caused broader reflection on how much we overlook or fail to perceive in the course of daily life.
For Murakoshi, the act of seeing itself is a crucial element of his photographic practice. When he looked at the familiar landscape of his home prefecture of Fukushima, he asked himself what had changed after the disaster and what had remained the same. He explains that to approach this honestly, he had to simply focus on the landscape before him without letting outside information or media narratives shape his expectations, and to listen carefully to what those places conveyed. For a photographer born and raised in Fukushima who had been working there long before the disaster, the sight of evacuation zones and restricted areas marked the beginning of a painful awareness that compelled him to reconsider, at the most basic level, what it meant to continue taking photographs in this place.
For me, photography cannot be reduced to “self-expression.” It means returning to my simple, irreducible visual experience of this moment, which no one can take away. It is perception distilled from that reality and from my own thoughts and memories, a set of imprints formed where they converge. Photography reflects the effort to observe with greater depth and to perceive the meaning of the world as it takes shape in my awareness. It is also the record of an unending dialogue with myself.
The many problems that Fukushima continues to face extend far beyond the span of a single life, and I may not live to see their resolution.
However, as someone born and raised here who has remained committed to photography, I believe that each image, seared with fragments of time and light, can help keep memory from fading.
Like a boat quietly resting somewhere in a story passed down through myth, I will continue to take photographs as questions offered in silence to the future and to each viewer who encounters them.
Toshiya Murakoshi
September 2025
What do we try to see, and what do we choose not to see? Murakoshi keeps that question in mind as he works, and it has become a fundamental motivation for his practice. The images in this exhibition invite us to reflect on the history of Fukushima, the memories carried by its people, and the act of seeing itself.
In conjunction with the exhibition, a book of works from the previous series The Wind Prays for Sublime Stillness will be published by ZEN FOTO GALLERY.
Toshiya Murakoshi was born in 1980 in Sukagawa, Fukushima. He graduated from Nippon Photography Institute in 2003. Currently based in Tokyo, Murakoshi has continuously shot his hometown since 2006. In 2009, he established the gallery “TAP” in Kiyosumi-Shirakawa, Tokyo. His solo exhibitions include “timelessness” at Konica Minolta Plaza (Tokyo, 2008), “uncertain” at Shinjuku Nikon Salon (Tokyo, 2009), “kusa wo fumuoto [sound of stepping on grass]” at Fukushima Airport (Fukushima, 2012), and “Burn After Seeing” at Kichijoji Art Museum, Musashino City (Tokyo, 2014). He is the recipient of the Photographic Society of Japan Newcomer’s Award (2011) and the Sagamihara Photograph New Face Incentive Award (2015). His works are included in the collections of the National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
