Review of "terra" exhibition 
Canon Gallery S 19th Jan / 4th Mar 2019
text : Kotaro Izawa :  photo critic

Japanese landscape photography became a popular genre by Yoichi Midorikawa, Shinzo Maeda, Toshinobu Takeuchi and others, pioneered by pre-war artists such as Shinzo Fukuhara. It has been on my mind that we haven’t seen many new developments for a few decades. However, after seeing GOTO Aki’s solo exhibition, I began to anticipate that he would fill in the blanks.
The 40 or so works on display at Canon Gallery S in Shinagawa, Tokyo, were all photographed in Japan in 2016-18. If you check out the filming locations such as Mt. Asama, Izu, Oirase, and Aso, you will find that they are Japan’s tourist destinations and mountains that anyone can climb. GOTO deconstructs the stereotypical landscape images that have been inputted beforehand and reconstructs them on the screen by reducing them to the elements of light, time, color, form, sound, temperature, smell, and wind. As a result, each landscape reveals “the eternal time and the primitive form of the planet, which have existed since ancient times.”

GOTO’s approach is a search for a new form of landscape photography for the digital age, but it does not completely ignore the accumulation of expression of past photographers. His photographs are a good blend of the precise and objective depiction of nature reminiscent of the work of the American photographer Eliot Porter and the Eastern view of nature that is evident in his photographs of Mt. Fuji and Inukai Falls. I can't wait to see how the world of the “terra” develops in the future. A book of photographs by the same title was published by AKAAKA Art Publishing to coincide with the exhibition.
31st Jan, 2019