Dates ｜May 17 – June 1, 2025
Venue｜MEM  map
Hours｜13:00 – 19:00
Closed | Monday (Open if Monday is a public holiday, closed the following weekday)
Phone | 03-6459-3205

Opening reception｜Saturday 17^th May, 17:00〜19:00

Hitoshi Fugo has long been attuned to what the photograph cannot capture. Though his lens captures tangible subjects, he treats them merely as catalysts, his camera turned towards something unseen, lying just beyond.

The series On the Ground, which lends its title to this exhibition, has not been formally presented until now. Comprising three distinct groups of work: Picking Up Cicadas, Touching the Time, and Seeing Sky and Earth, the project began around 2004 and gradually took shape through the sustained back-and-forth between image-making and reflection, like a tree deepening its roots, extending its branches, and growing dense with leaves.

At the end of each summer, Fugo would collect cicadas that had fallen lifeless near his home or in the neighboring schoolyard. Examining the bodies in his hands, he found each one carried a distinct character, some nibbled by other insects, some with torn wings, others crushed or missing limbs. The veins of their wings, bodily structures, and the sheen of their surfaces revealed a quiet, sculptural beauty. Captivated by these forms, Fugo photographed each cicada meticulously, capturing both front and back, and printed those images. As the number of specimens grew, he began grinding them, one by one, into fine powder. He placed each palmful of powder into a small glass vial, which, like the cicadas themselves, revealed their own singular presence. Fugo then photographed the vials, arranging the images with each cicada’s front and back shots into triptychs. It was, perhaps, his quiet act of burial.

All living lings, cicadas and humans alike, are born and return to the earth. Our existence is part of that ongoing cycle. Fugo wondered whether it was possible to photograph the flow and strata of cyclical time accumulated over millennia. Around that time, an excavation unearthing traces of the Jōmon and Yayoi periods was underway in the schoolyard near his home. The exposed layers of the soil in those dug-out pits revealed thousands of years of sedimented time; it was an encounter with the deep past. Touching the Time began with his photographs of these layers and has since developed into an ongoing record of the schoolyard, a site that continues to change day by day.

Each time he visited the site, Fugo also photographed the ground at his feet and the sky directly above from a predetermined point in the schoolyard, producing paired images anchored to that fixed position; Seeing Sky and Earth.

Picking Up Cicadas offers a meticulous depiction of life’s final form. Touching the Time traces the connection from the present to the deep past. Seeing Sky and Earth aligns the earth and cosmos through a single line of sight. These three series, revolving around the remains of cicadas, come together to form a constellation of images titled On the Ground.