EXHIBITIONS
Yoshiyuki Okuyama “photographs”
Dates: May 15 – Jun 13, 2026
Location: Taka Ishii Gallery Photography / Film
Taka Ishii Gallery Photography / Film is pleased to present photographs, a solo exhibition of the work of Yoshiyuki Okuyama, on view from Friday, May 15 to Saturday, June 13. The exhibition features approximately 28 works from a photographic series of the same title, made from Okuyama’s family albums.
The series began with the discovery of more than a hundred family albums at the house where Okuyama’s grandparents and father once lived, and where he now has his studio. Turning through the pages, he found himself thinking about how each generation’s choices had passed life on to the next generation, and about the ethical framework those choices implied. He also began to see that while these were lives that could be understood in the collective context of the family, each person had existed first as an individual, before any role within it was assigned.
In the photographs series, edited and brought to its final form by Okuyama, each figure in the original album photographs has been dissolved into a glow of light. The space this creates stirs the viewer’s imagination, and what was once a single private family album becomes everyone’s album, and ultimately something that can be universally shared.
…The texture of light, released toward hope, slowly softens what is particular about each face and outline. What remains is someone, anyone, a figure whose silhouette slowly comes to overlap with our own as we look. In that wavering moment, we are asked anew what it is to exist as an individual.
Yoshiyuki Okuyama (excerpted from statement for this exhibition), March 2026
Engaging with the tension between inheritance and autonomy, between reverence for the history of succession that reaches him and the private choices and unspoken codes he lives by, Okuyama’s photographs opens up a dialogue with those who came before, and with himself in the present moment.
A book accompanying the exhibition will be published, with details below
[New Publication]
Yoshiyuki Okuyama, photographs
Published by AKAAKA Art Publishing
Price: Standard edition ¥7,700 (tax incl.); Special edition ¥16,500 (limited edition of 500 copies, signed)
Yoshiyuki Okuyama was born in 1991 in Tokyo. He began producing photographic works in 2009 and marked his debut with the receipt of the 34th New Cosmos of Photography Excellence Award in 2011. Ever since, he has continued to produce works that center on the theme of contradiction and the mixture of contrary elements such as representation and abstraction. In 2016 he won the 47th Kodansha Publishing Culture Award Photography Award with Bacon Ice Cream (Parco Publishing, 2015). His publications include Girl (Plancton, 2012), The Town You Live in (Space Shower Books, 2017), As the Call, So the Echo (AKAAKA Art Publishing, 2017), Pocari Sweat (Seigensha Art Publishing, 2018), Los Angeles / San Francisco (Union Publishing, 2018), The Good Side (Editions Bessard, 2020), flowers (AKAAKA, 2021), Bacon Ice Cream, Taiwan edition (Uni Books, 2021), Ton! Tan! Pan! Don! (bookshop M, 2021), Best Before (Seigensha Art Publishing, 2022), and windows (AKAAKA, 2023). Solo exhibitions include Girl (Raum1F, Tokyo, 2012), Bacon Ice Cream (PARCO Museum, Tokyo, 2016), The New Story (Post, Tokyo, 2016), As the Call, So the Echo (Gallery916, Tokyo, 2017), The Town You Live in (Omotesando Hills Space O, Tokyo, 2017), White Light (Canon Gallery S, Tokyo, 2019), windows (amanaTIGP, Tokyo, 2023), and flowers (Purple, Kyoto, 2023). He has also directed the films At The Bench (2024) and 5 Centimeters per Second (2025).
