Seoul is set to get a new fair in November focused on art and design, after the company organising Art Busan, a fair in the country’s south, secured funding to open an event in the capital. The inaugural DEFINE Seoul (1-5 November, titled after “design” and “fine art”), will feature around 35 exhibitors and take place in the Seongsu design district, centred around the Layer Studio cultural complex, but with events spilling out into design studios and other locations across the neighbourhood.
“We are witnessing increased attention on Korea’s art and cultural scene from abroad like never before,” says Seokho Jeong, Art Busan’s managing director. Indeed, since the launch of Frieze Seoul, the city has seemingly cemented itself as a key market hub, but Jeong says that Art Busan has been “carefully monitoring the market” since well before the advent of Frieze Seoul, and was “considering various possibilities to expand prior to Covid”. In 2020, Art Busan staged a separate design section at its Busan fair, as a trial run for a standalone event.
DTeo Yang will direct Define Seoul
While Frieze Seoul caters more to Western tastes, the organisers of DEFINE say their fair will focus on an “eastern aesthetic and Korean heritage”. The interior designer Teo Yang, who has joined the fair as its artistic director, will organise the inaugural edition around the theme of “A look within matter”.
The Seoul fair represents a big step up for the Art Busan brand, which has staged an annual fair in Busan since 2012. Jeong says that Art Busan will continue to expand in 2024, both in offline and digital settings, but will remain a brand “focused on the art market”. Nonetheless, he says that “often, fun ideas pop up when we collaborate with or monitor what is happening in other industries”. The first funding round, which raised an undisclosed sum, was supported by Sanghun Kim, former chief executive of Naver; Kelvin Dongho Kim, chief executive of Korea Credit Data (KCD); Tony Lyu, venture partner at SoftBank Ventures Asia; and Simon Seojoon Kim, chief executive of Hashed. The next funding round will take place in autumn next year.
“Matthew Wong: The Realm of Appearances,” at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, is the oddest of ducks, a superb exhibition in which half the paintings are clumsy. Even some of the superb ones are half clumsy. That’s Wong’s charm in a nutshell, though: he seems to have had little interest in producing tasteful, polished, well-made art, thank God. His limitations were obvious from the start; in the years leading up to his suicide, in 2019, at the age of thirty-five, he didn’t correct them so much as put them to work. Once he got going, his compositions stumbled their way into smart choreographies, and his colors could be so dog-whistle shrill as to land with an eerie hush. He was a terrifyingly fast learner, too—walking through this show is like watching one of those time-lapse videos of a plant exploding out of soil. In a fair world, there would be a forest by now.
Wong painted landscapes. Art history offers a few possible terms for his style: “naïve art,” “outsider art,” “art brut.” “Outsider art” seems to be the one that’s stuck (“Outside,” a 2016 group show in Amagansett, helped put him on the map), though the truth is grayer. He taught himself to paint, but only after he’d cooled on photography, the subject of his M.F.A. He spent little time in New York but years in Hong Kong, home to the third-biggest art market on the planet. Despite being tall, good-looking, and snappily dressed, he often felt uncomfortable around people, and struggled with depression and autism. He had powerful allies in the Manhattan gallery world, though most of them he met only near the end of his life.
How much of an outsider was he, really? It’s a silly question, but it matters. A Wong painting is about inside versus outside, in every sense: social, psychological, spatial, formal. He knew his blue-chip artists, and the wall text identifies bits lifted from Wu Guanzhong, Gustav Klimt, Yayoi Kusama, and Edvard Munch. (The show, organized by the Dallas Museum of Art and curated by Vivian Li, does a smart job of exploring Wong’s influences without overexplaining.) On the other end of the seesaw, you find visual ideas so basic that you’ve known about them since you were four: the sun is a yellow disk with lines poking out of it; a body is a blob with four sticks and a circle attached; a tree is a vertical line with squiggles on top. The childish comes face to face with the canonical, but there’s no dialogue between them, unless collision counts. Wong never tries to lighten the mood, either. His paintings are humorless to the bone, and their thick impasto surfaces, invisible in the Facebook photos that first got gallerists’ attention, add a bonus whiff of anxiety.
When images like these don’t work, they are crude and nothing else. When they do, they are crude and everything else: vulnerable, cunning, ecstatic, menacing. “The Kingdom” (2017) is a painting of a forest that a terrified kid might dream about. You wouldn’t be wrong to call it Wong’s homage to Klimt’s “Birch Forest” (1903), but it’s more like a point-by-point rebuttal: instead of cozy emptiness, he gives you a suffocating place that wasn’t meant for human beings; instead of Klimt’s misty outdoor cathedral, he hits you with a phalanx of pale, blue-spotted trees, the pigments all but pricking your eyeballs. He has a way of making the outdoors look like the interior of some cramped, windowless room. There is a small, crowned figure—possibly a reference to the Chinese character for Wong’s last name, which means “king”—but nobody else. What’s the point of ruling a place where you can barely breathe?
Most of the art in this show has been divided between two galleries: one, in the horribly abbreviated terms that Wong’s death imposes, for “early” work and the other for “late.” I suggest you walk briskly through “late,” take “early” at mid-tempo, and finish by giving “late” the second, longer look it deserves. There’s a fine line between chaos and incoherence, and Wong needed a few years to get on the right side of it. “Heaven and Earth” (2015), one of the oldest works on display, is both a fair sample of the abstract ink-on-paper painting that he favored at first and a prime example of garden-variety confusion: there’s no rhythm or momentum to the brush marks, which go from thin to thick to splattered with an abruptness that’s almost surly. The early triumphs tend to be bits and pieces rather than entire paintings—the tall, gray mountain in “Landscape of the Longing” (2016), which bears a freaky resemblance to a sleeping vulture; or the furious sun in “Landscape with Mother and Child” (2017), which looks like the kind they used to sacrifice people to.
By 2018, Wong had learned three important tricks: sowing his landscapes with small figures to provide a sense of scale; using snaky diagonal forms (rivers, roads) to separate near from far; tempering layers of warm colors with cool ones. Marvel at how far the trio takes him in the mini-epic desert scene “Once Upon a Time in the West” (2018). The brushwork hasn’t changed too much, but now a magnetic current runs through everything: your gaze shoots from the dozing woman and the little beast in the foreground to the dark mountains in the distance, and when you get tired of the bright oranges and pinks in the lower half you can rest your eyes on the deep blues above. The painting’s title comes from Sergio Leone—Wong was a cinephile, too—but its light reminds me of a line from David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive”: “It’s not day or night. It’s kinda half-night, you know?”
The paintings that Wong completed in 2018 and 2019, the last two years of his life, tend to have this half-night illumination, a glow that is also a burn. It was around this time that he discovered how much drama he could wring from the color blue. Mix one breakthrough with the other and you get “Tracks in the Blue Forest” (2018), something like the long, weary sigh to “The Kingdom” ’s panic attack. When you study it closely, you begin to see how savvy Wong was at turning his formal weaknesses upside down: he was never great at conveying weight, but that’s half the reason the painting works. The lower edge is an almost indecipherable bluish white, and the trees don’t widen with roots as they approach the ground—they just stop, as though dangling from the sky. The more you stare, the less solid it all looks, until the only thing left holding you steady is the set of footprints running up the middle of the canvas, at once comforting and tormenting.
“Tracks in the Blue Forest” is, unmistakably, a painting about loneliness, the curse of outsiders who want to come in. It was Wong’s great theme, and at his best he handled it with amazingly little mawkishness. That isn’t to say that “Tracks” is un-mawkish: like a number of the later, gentler paintings on display, it flatters loneliness with beauty, and seems to long for an old-fashioned, Munchian version of the feeling, all grand introspection and dazzling vistas. By contrast, there isn’t a single sentimental brushstroke in “Old Town” (2017), let alone a nostalgic one. More than any image I can think of, it looks the way twenty-first-century digital isolation feels: bright and draining, without the alibi of physical distance. It’s another claustrophobic landscape—even the sky is just one more gawky structure—but this time nothing is obviously wrong, which means that nothing can be repaired. Tiny figures seem too far away for conversation but not far enough to long for one another. Their pain is deafening. Normally it makes sense to praise a work of art by saying that you could look at it forever, but in the case of “Old Town,” one of the most haunting paintings of the past few years, I almost wish I could forget. ♦
The permanent collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) in Toronto contains a bronze sculpture entitled The Crucified Christ (Corpus) and attributed to the seventeenth-century Roman artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini. The piece was donated to the art gallery by the late Murray Frum in 2006. What isn’t well known is that the bronze was lost to history for centuries, and even after decades on the art market, the campaign to attribute the work to Bernini only began about twenty years ago. Visitors to the Toronto gallery are given no reason to think that the attribution is controversial. But there is good evidence to suspect that the $50 million bronze is not what it is claimed to be.
I stumbled upon this controversy during a recent exchange with Professor Franco Mormando—a world-class Bernini scholar and the author of the 2011 biography Bernini: His Life and His Rome. In a discussion about Bernini’s politics, Mormando let slip that “there is a great debate among Bernini scholars about the attribution of the AGO bronze crucifix.” I was shocked to hear this at first. I had casually followed the story of the Frum donation in the local newspapers, and I visit the AGO several times a year, but I had never caught even a whiff of the controversy. I imagine most of the public are unaware of this.
How the bronze crucifix in the Art Gallery of Ontario got from seventeenth-century Rome to twenty-first century Toronto is an intriguing tale, but it is a narrative filled with gaps. Fortunately, there is a lot that we do know. Bernini was first commissioned to produce a bronze crucifix for the king of Spain in 1653–54. That work, still extant, looks very much like the AGO bronze, especially to the untrained eye.
A year or so later, a second crucifix was commissioned by Cardinal Francesco Barberini for his Parisian residence and donated to King Louis XIV after the Cardinal’s death. It is recorded in the 1684 royal inventory but seems to have gone missing just before the French Revolution. Was it melted down in an anti-clerical frenzy, or did it manage to survive the Terror, having been smuggled away to somewhere safe? We don’t know. In addition, yet another bronze is mentioned in the historical record. According to an early biographer, this was a sculpture that Bernini initially “made for himself” and which the sculptor then gave to Cardinal Francesco Maria Sforza Pallavicino when Bernini visited Paris in 1665. Unfortunately, the historical trail goes cold here, until the early twentieth century.
In 1908, in Venice, a Parisian art dealer sold a large, bronze crucifix to an American financier. At this point, there was no suggestion that the work could be a Bernini. A few decades later, the bronze was sold to Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge, in whose private collection it remained until 1975, when it was part of an estate sale at Sotheby’s. At the auction, the bronze, which was described as “French late 17th century,” failed to fetch its meagre $200 asking price. Eventually, the work was purchased by an antique dealer in London, after which it bounced between private collectors in Spain and Monte Carlo.
This is when the attributions to Bernini began. In 2002, the Italian art critic Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco declared that the bronze was, in fact, the sculpture that had passed from Cardinal Barberini to Louis XIV centuries earlier. Then, in 2005, another highly regarded Italian art historian, Tomaso Montanari, argued that the bronze was in fact the other missing sculpture—the one Bernini gifted to Cardinal Pallavicino back in 1665. Art historian and dealer Andrew Butterfield also endorsed the Bernini attribution on behalf of the (now defunct) Salander–O’Reilly gallery in New York, run by disgraced gallerist Larry Salander. In a breathless 2016 profile of Butterfield for the Financial Times, Dalya Alberge claims that the art dealer “was able to prove … that a bronze statue of the crucifixion that had failed to sell at auction in 1975 for $200 was in fact a lost Bernini now worth a staggering $50 million.” The major American art museums did not seem to share this conviction. None of them agreed to purchase the supposed Bernini.
Enter Murray Frum. Frum was a public-spirited Toronto businessman and art collector who, to his credit, believed that the apparently long-lost Bernini should be enjoyed by everyone. Frum purchased the bronze for $25 million and donated it to the AGO. Its appraised value quickly swelled to double the purchasing price.
As noted, there are critics who are sceptical that the piece is a genuine Bernini. Art historian and specialist in the Baroque period Charles Scribner III is among those who have challenged the claim. Scribner does not contend that the AGO bronze is a forgery or fake. Instead, he believes that the sculpture is a pastiche: the result of a “joint project” by Bernini himself and other sculptors (“non-Bernini,” as he puts it). According to Scribner, it is neither the bronze commissioned by Cardinal Barberini (as Fagiolo dell’Arco claimed) nor the one that Bernini supposedly “made for himself,” before gifting it to Cardinal Pallavicino (as Montanari believes). Scribner thinks that some parts of the AGO bronze were probably made from Bernini’s original moulds, but other parts were cast from moulds made by other people. There are compelling reasons to believe that Bernini himself was not involved in the completion of the work.
So, what is so “non-Bernini” about the AGO bronze? For Scribner, the most compelling piece of evidence is the lack of a “side wound.” The gospels relate that, when Christ died, a Roman centurion (a man named Longinus according to later, extra-Biblical texts) “pierced his side, and forthwith came there out blood [invoking the Eucharist] and water [Baptism].” Tradition has it that, as a result of witnessing this miraculous event, Longinus converted from paganism to Christianity. The side wound is clearly present on the Spanish bronze—and on every single sculpture of the dead Christ that we can confidently attribute to Bernini. Dozens of these smaller works populate the Vatican. The first reason to be sceptical, then, is this evident inconsistency.
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Of course, oversights happen. Perhaps Bernini was on a tight deadline and, in his hurry, omitted a detail that would have been added late in the “construction” process—at the stage of final chasing. But if the AGO bronze was originally designed for Bernini himself, for his own private devotions (and he was devout), then the omission seems inexplicable. If Montanari is correct, this was not a commissioned work that Bernini was desperate to get out the door quickly. It seems odd that Bernini would have omitted this theologically crucial detail—especially since, in 1638, he had spent months in the Vatican carving a massive sculpture of the centurion in question.
Bernini had spent significant time and energy, then, toiling away at a sculpture of Longinus—a work whose creation would have required both physical exertion and intellectual focus—trying to depict the complex psychology of his subject and the religious significance of his actions. It is hard to imagine that he would have deliberately omitted include the side wound in a subsequent work made purely for himself.
For Scribner, the second problem is the drapery. If we look carefully, we can see that the drapery of the earlier, Spanish bronze is flatter and more compact and lacks what the AGO curators describe as “the dynamic movement of the loincloth.” This constraint is appropriate, given that this is a depiction of the dead Christ. It invites the viewer to focus on the lifeless body on the cross. By contrast, the drapery on the AGO bronze looks as if it has been captured mid-movement. It seems to be almost whooshing upwards—a dynamism more appropriate for depictions of a still-living Christ. Montanari explains this inconsistency by speculating that the AGO bronze is neither a true Cristo morto nor a Cristo vivo, but depicts a comatose Jesus, caught in the moment between life and death. The loincloth’s upward flourish thus prefigures Christ’s ascension to heaven. But it seems unlikely that Bernini—artist and impresario of the Counter-Reformation—would have taken such liberties with representational tradition or theological orthodoxy. It seems much more likely that the drapery was cast by someone other than Bernini and without his oversight.
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In fact, as Scribner argues, the levitating drapery on the AGO bronze is more stylistically akin to the drapery cast by Bernini’s Roman rival, Alessandro Algardi. If we accept Montanari’s thesis that the AGO bronze was a work Bernini made for his own personal use, why would he have copied the signature flourish that characterised Algardi’s depiction of Christ’s loincloth?
Of course, this similarity does not definitively prove the sceptics’ case, but art attribution is often a matter of interpreting subtle clues and patiently accumulating evidence.
When we look at the two bronzes side by side, we can spot other differences, too. While the heads and upper bodies are very similar (and possibly cast from the same mould), the legs and feet are clearly not the same. The AGO’s Christ has thinner, almost sinewy legs, and his feet are longer. His lean lower body contrasts strikingly with his muscular arms and torso—a tension that is absent from the Spanish bronze. As a result, AGO’s Christ is not as harmonious a composition as the earlier work, upon which it was modelled.
When the two bronzes were displayed side by side at a Bernini exhibition at Rome’s Borghese Gallery in 2017–18, Bernini scholar Anna Coliva, former director of the Borghese, found their discrepancies striking:
The placement of the marvellous gilded bronze crucifix from the Escorial [the Spanish bronze] executed by Bernini between 1654 and 56, next to the bronze crucifix acquired by the Toronto Museum in 2006, revealed that a direct execution by Bernini [of the latter] was untenable … The details, observable so close together, revealed the relative lack of skill in the casting technique of the Toronto version compared to the very high level of the one in the Escorial; just as the compactness of the proportions of the latter reveals the incongruous attenuation of the limbs which give the Canadian crucifix a “slithery” shape. [All translations from the Italian are by Charles Scribner III.]
In his 1955 book Bernini: The Sculptor of the Roman Baroque, Rudolf Wittkower includes a comprehensive list of all the works then known to be by Bernini. Obviously, this “catalogue raisonnée”—which was considered the authoritative source of Bernini attributions for generations—did not include the AGO bronze, which, as noted above, was still being described as a “late French 17th century” work at auction twenty years later. Recently, however, Maria Grazia Bernardini has published a massive, updated catalogue that meticulously documents both Bernini’s certified works and those with contested attributions. In her entry on the AGO bronze she writes:
In juxtaposition, the two [the Escorial bronze and the AGO bronze] appear similar yet with profound differences: they derive from the same prototype but with substantial differences in details that render Montanari’s hypothesis untenable that the AGO version came from the model, even if revisited, for the Escorial [Spanish] corpus … the legs are longer and thinner … the prominent abdomen is completely altered in its connection with the upper torso … Pending further findings by critics, the Toronto bronze must therefore be assigned to an artist in the circle of Bernini, based on a prototype by Bernini, but without his intervention.
Some art historians do support the attribution to Bernini, however. Evonne Levy, a world-class Bernini scholar from the University of Toronto, assured me that the AGO bronze is “100% based on Bernini’s models.” But some scholars clearly remain sceptical. Given the lack of scholarly consensus, why is a Toronto art museum claiming to possess a Bernini? Perhaps because of the incentive structures that operate throughout the art world. Rescuing a long-lost work from obscurity and restoring it to its rightful place in the canon is surely the dream of many art historians. Commercial galleries and auction houses are likewise motivated to upgrade works, as owning and displaying famous works brings them money and prestige. Wealthy donors and philanthropists want to purchase and donate big-name works in order to increase their social capital and burnish their legacies. Prestigious museums and galleries aggressively pursue works by canonical figures, as they attract visitors and enhance their institutional reputations. Local academics, who need to work closely with those museums and galleries, also have a vested interest in flattering museum directors by ignoring potential attribution controversies. Government agencies are more likely to dole out grants to people working on projects featuring well-known artists. And the thousands of visitors who pour through the doors of galleries like the AGO are clamouring to see works fashioned by those luminaries whose names they remember from their art history survey courses and their high school textbooks.
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So, how should the AGO handle this? I think they should let the public know about the controversy. The curators could mount a photograph of the Spanish bronze next to the supposed Bernini and invite viewers to spot the differences. They might include a brief summary of its attribution history in the label next to their sculpture. There’s a compelling story here, and AGO visitors are surely mature enough to understand that it is not always possible to be certain about the provenance and authorship of a centuries-old artwork. We could all learn something important from this—but only if the museum curators and gallery directors are willing to engage with the sceptics.
As downtown visitors celebrated the first Friday of September with painting and food trucks, the 10th annual Artist Alley exhibit had an opening reception.
The majority of artists who contributed to the newest exhibit attended the celebration and mingled with their fellow exhibitors, of which a handful were new to the public art space.
Near the Main Street alley opening, Lesley Wysong spoke to visitors about her fourth piece in the alley, “Indiana Pollinators: Ten Butterflies for Ten Years.”
It took her about a month to paint.
Each butterfly was meant to represent a year the Artist Alley had been open. Accompanying her painting, Wysong distributed pamphlets that listed each of the native butterflies and host plants that promote their population growth.
Pointing to a small blue butterfly at the bottom of the painting, she explained the Karner Blue once lived in the Indiana Dunes. The population disappeared a bit more than a decade ago because of the loss of wild lupine.
According to the University of Notre Dame, “the Karner blue is believed to have gone extinct at the Indiana Dunes, making it the first federally endangered species to suffer this fate in a national park due to climate change.”
“Hopefully the rest of them won’t become extinct,” Wysong said.
In a later email, though, she noted, “Sadly this will likely not be the last butterfly species to experience extinction as some species are more fragile and have more specific habitat requirements thus a much smaller range.”
Wysong’s painting from last year’s Artist Alley exhibit is now on display at the Kokomo-Howard County Public Library’s South Branch butterfly garden.
Titled “Hope Blossoms,” the painting depicts each stage of a monarch butterfly’s life.
The artist said she hopes the painting and butterfly garden encourages visitors to research native pollinators at the library and plant pesticide-free native plants and flowers to support the butterflies.
If everyone did a little bit to help, she said, they could make a noticeable difference.
Nearby, Lisa Ananich Freeland, prepared to show off her first painting in Artist Alley, “Owl No. 2 Love Effervescent.”
Her first owl painting can be found in the neighboring downtown Artworks gallery, along with her art dolls. The artist said she looked forward to painting a third owl.
She also noted she prefers to produce large-scale paintings. While Freeland enjoys murals, she added, the large marine boards in the alley can be moved if the artist or a customer wants to bring the paintings somewhere else.
“It’s a great thing to be a part of,” Freeland said of the Artist Alley. She added she was in good company and had been excited for the chance to display her work in the outdoor gallery.
Another newcomer, Dajanell Johnson, said she was encouraged to submit work to the Artist Alley by one of its frequent contributors, her former teacher Deb Edwards.
She explained her painting, “A Walk in a Park,” depicts an idyllic setting she first painted during the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s meant to distract audiences from stress and remind them to appreciate life.
Dajanell Johnson talks about her painting in the Artist Alley opening reception during First Friday’s Artsapalooza on Friday.
It took a bit of effort to reproduce the work on a marine board, she said, especially the gradient shading on the painting’s rolling hills.
Johnson said the installation made her feel more successful as an artist.
“I’m just glad my name is getting out there,” she said.
Heather Polk returned for her second year in the Artist Alley.
As a crowd gathered around her painting, “Lemon Blueberry Doughnuts,” she explained there were two Kokomo sites that inspired her work.
In the painting, a lemon and a blueberry — both wearing dark sunglasses — float on a pair of innertubes. The lemon and blueberry, she explained, were inspired by a lemon blueberry doughnut from Lucky Lemon Bakery. The innertubes were inspired by Kokomo Beach.
Heather Polk talks about the inspiration behind her painting displayed in Artist Alley during the opening reception at First Friday’s Artsapalooza on Friday.
She said the joy of last year’s artist reception prompted her to resubmit work to the alley.
Polk had purchased two paintings from Alley artist Robin Coyner and was excited to meet him during the 2022 dedication.
“To talk to him and have him approach my art last year and just talk to me about it was just such a surreal feeling,” Polk said. “It’s pretty much for the experience again and also to say ‘yeah, I can do this. I can make something bigger.”
Each of the paintings in the alley are for sale, ranging from $150 to $1,200.
“You’re supporting your local economy, your creative economy,” said Susan Alexander of the Greater Kokomo Economic Development Alliance.
Inside the Artworks gallery, a collection of photos were hung on the second floor’s wall.
An empty alleyway is shown in the first few photos. Local Boy Scout troops are shown painting the backdrops the works now display.
As visitors walk along the wall, they’re able to see each piece of art that has been featured over the decade. At the far end of one wall, there are photos of additional backdrops being installed.
The alley has been full every year.
Ramona Daniels is one of the most frequently exhibited artists in the alley.
Between conversations with people popping into her Artworks gallery studio, she said the sense of community brings her back to Artist Alley each year.
This year’s installation, titled “Beauty in the Garden,” depicts two peacocks. One is blue, the other is white. Daniels said it’s meant to represent diversity.
“In spite of our differences, we’re all beautiful and we need to learn how to love and respect each other,” Daniels said. “We get the opportunity to say something to the community. I just like to create pieces for people to look at and maybe get some hope — inspire them in some kind of way.”
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Katsu Naito, an 18-year-old chef, arrived in New York in 1983 from his native Japan. By 1988 he had settled in Manhattan’s Harlem neighbourhood, an area only just recovering from the brutal economic devastation of the 1970s, before the drastic dislocation brought upon longtime residents of this historically black community in the 1990s.
Clockwise from top left: Harlem Parking Lot, 1993, Gangs Home Deli, 1991, Bob’s News Shack on 5th Avenue, 1992, Street Stage, 1993.
“In 1986, I visited Harlem to photograph, but it didn’t feel right as a mere visitor. To truly capture the essence, I knew I had to be part of the community. In April 1988, I moved to Harlem, residing at 109 W 112th Street, #37. Every day felt like watching a movie from my third-floor apartment on St Nicholas Avenue.”
An outsider in all but residence, Naito walked the neighbourhood, camera in hand, for two years before shooting his first frame. Slowly, he became familiar with the people and community around him, and they with him. In time he was welcomed in as a member of his Harlem neighbourhood.
Top left: Harlem Girl, 1992. Top right: Boombox Girl, 1992. Above: Welcome to Harlem, 1992
“It took nearly two years to integrate and become part of the community. There was a corner store on my block, which I later discovered was associated with a monitored ‘gang’; they stocked only dry canned goods, and it was common to witness them wielding guns at night, shooting at abandoned buildings or into the air. I grew accustomed to the smell of gunpowder and finding bullet shells on my rooftop. Once they realised I meant no harm, Harlem showed me its various faces. I became a part of the community, roaming the neighbourhood with my camera.”
Naito’s work includes landscape photography, urban documentary, and makeshift plein air studio portraits (reminiscent of Richard Avedon’s outdoor staging). The Harlem pictures are both historical documents and part of an American photographic tradition of foreign-born artists chronicling American peoples and customs.
Clockwise from top left: Radio Cassette Player Man, Lady Holding Newspaper and Grocery Bag, Mr. Harman, Art Student, all 1992.
“Encountering familiar faces daily, we acknowledged each other organically. Mr Gwen, also known as Mr Bob, sold newspapers in a shack on 119th Street and 5th Avenue, where broken chairs sat in front. This became my daily gathering spot with neighbours and elders, where I discovered the beauty of Harlem.
Left: So Close, Yet So Far, 1992. Right: 122nd Street, 1992.
“My pictures from this series capture moments and places with a significance. The Harlem tree, for instance, is a tree located right in front of the public school on 131th street. This tree still exists today but all the sneakers have been gone since the late 90s. I just hope this decoration is celebratory or for an artistic purpose, and not gang-related.
Harlem Tree, 1998
“I always loved to watch the street scenes from the 3rd floor window. The RIP STINKER and supermarket and deli pictures speak a lot about this neighbourhood. This deli was where people kept their guns, machine guns, shotguns and drugs. As the night progresses and kids are no longer playing on the street, another face of Harlem can be seen.
RIP STINKER, 1992
“On an opposite side of the deli was an abandoned building, an easy target for target practice. The gangs were a part of our community, but despite their bold actions they never liked to have their pictures taken, never.
Wall Message, 1992
“One of the newest works in this series is Gone Vibes at Lenox Lounge, which was actually taken more than 10 years after I moved out of Harlem in October 2016. Within six months the building was demolished; it had stood there for 78 years and it felt like a sign that all the vibes were gone from Harlem.
Gone Vibes at Lenox Lounge, 2016
“For nearly six years I had lived in Harlem, experiencing time at its own pace. This profound journey granted me a glimpse into people’s souls and fostered deep connections. Harlem served as the perfect backdrop for personal growth. I am sincerely grateful to Harlem for the invaluable opportunity to capture these beautiful images.”
Katsu Naito’s Once in Harlem series, including previously unseen pictures, is exhibited by the Fridge, 8-10 September, as part of PHOTOFAIRS New York
