shashasha

Yu Shinoda’s photobook “Fragments of the place 2017-2019” was inspired when the artist was invited to exhibit his work as part of a special group exhibition commemorating the closing of the Nagano Prefectural Shinano Art Museum in 2016. Shinoda, whose photographic work has focused on ruins, architectural remains and buildings to be demolished, decided to follow the demolition of the old museum building and the construction of the new one. Throughout the series, Shinoda varies his physical distance, moving from overlooking perspectives to photographing details of the museum and its surroundings that will have gone unnoticed by most visitors during the museum’s lifetime. Throughout the series, he captures something intangible, a “museum essence” that seems to exist as an entity separate from the physical building.
The book concludes with an afterword by the artist and an extensive essay by curator Tadashi Matsui about Yu Shinoda’s work and the history of the Nagano Prefectural Museum of Art (all texts in English and Japanese).

“It was the roof, the walls, the windows, the chairs, the lights, the glass, and the concrete, which had passed through time on their own, that kept the function of a museum and the concept of artworks intact in a sense. It was the parking lot, the planting, the bulletin board, the fountain. The trees that surrounded the building. Fallen leaves and undergrowth. Insects and birds. I wanted to remember that they had once been there.”
― from Yu Shinoda’s afterword