Ayako Kimura holds up her coffee cup for closer inspection. “Finding the beauty behind everyday objects, catching their energy, the echoes of their life – this is what photography can do.” Seeing my nonplussed expression, the 28-year-old photographer says softly, “Now perhaps you understand 60% of what I’m trying to say, but the photographs will show you 95%. To see the small things is enriching.” She places the cup back on the table.
Kimura’s first solo exhibition, opening at Craft Peace Cafe on November 17, is full of small things. A Clear Pulse features images of quotidian objects which are often overlooked in the rush of life: a spill of rambutans, an unopened lotus, a wrinkled hand. “I want to capture their history, their energy, their beauty,” Kimura says, explaining her fascination with these apparently unremarkable everyday objects.
Beauty is a common thread in her photographs, which are characterised on a stylistic level by soft light, static composition and a low-angle composition redolent of traditional Japanese aesthetics. The Osaka-born photographer, who has been based in Cambodia for over a year, admits that her tendency to find the best in her photographic subjects, be they a roadside cow or a handful of green peppercorns, might well stem from her day job as a commercial photographer. However, she also sees her fascination with beauty as integral to her personality as an artist: “I respect the subject and I want to show its good side; maybe this is my character,” she muses. “But if I were a war photographer maybe this would change!”
While far from a latter day Robert Capa, Kimura is not averse to using her depictions of beauty to examine serious social issues. Like many creatives in contemporary Cambodia she expresses concern over the swift changes sweeping the country. Moves towards mass-production and assembly line aesthetics, comparable to the cultural shifts experienced by Japan in decades past, affect people in invisible ways. “In modern Japan everything is readymade, everything is identical. This affects people’s views on beauty, and changes cultural values.”
The rubric of industrialisation and globalisation which subtends modern living is largely absent in A Clear Pulse. Instead, the photographs depict timeless scenes: landscapes, portraits and numerous still lives. One striking image, a swarm of brown bodies clambering in the branches of a banyan tree, captures the childlike joy in life which Kimura is so keen to portray. “I want people to notice the small things in life before they’re gone. I think this is what I can do.”
WHO: Ayako Kimura
WHAT: A Clear Pulse photo exhibition
WHERE: Craft Peace Cafe, St. 392, BKK1
WHEN: From 2pm November 17 (tea and cakes provided!)
WHY: Learn to appreciate the little things