Kuroda by Laure Menanteau - Cosmogarden New York City

Aki Kuroda - Cosmogarden New York City by Laure Menanteau, 2010

As a child, the young Japanese Aki Kuroda learned his visual skills from the famous magazine of the 1930s Le Minotaure, then experienced a real aesthetic shock with the discovery of Picasso and Dali.

Unable to support the weight of the ancestral Japanese tradition, he chose to escape from Tokyo, traveled through Europe and the United States, then settled in Paris in 1970, a chosen city in which he never stopped to wander around, like the Benjaminian "flâneur", and where he will make decisive encounters - the novelist Marguerite Duras, the philosophers Jacques Derrida and Michel Serre (who participated in Noise, a new artistic and cultural review created in 1985), the he writer Pascal Quignard, the choreographer Angelin Preljocaj, for whom he created the sets and costumes for the ballet Parade in 2008, but also astrophysicists, psychoanalysts...

Aki Kuroda is a man of "passages": between cultures, between East and West, between "the pure calm of the Zen universe and the swarming of graffiti", between soul and body, between archaic myths and the future to be invented, finally between the arts, whether drawing, painting, engraving, sculpture, fresco, photography, decor, installation, scenography, etc. Since the 1990s, he has initiated a unique project, Cosmogarden, a series of “show-performances” that he has developed with dancers and architects.

Kuroda also wants to be a thinker and, as far as possible, a reformer of the city: the Western functionalist city having admitted its failure, "the artist must create in the city a different space, something twisted , a fallow land, so that people can rediscover the human dimension”, he likes to repeat.

The photographs of New York presented at the MEP, supplemented by a dozen drawings, can be seen as a travel diary, an intimate visual diary, which tell of the vital energy of the megalopolis, of the flows that cross it and irrigate it. , lights, signs and billboards that draw a real urban spelling and sign the inexhaustible magic of New York.

Aki Kuroda - Cosmogarden New York City by Laure Menanteau, 2010

*Text written for the exhibition Cosmogarden New York City at La Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris, 2010.

"The European House of Photography presents a lesser known, but no less important part of the extremely diversified activity of Aki Kuroda, his photographic work associated here with a new series of drawings. From June 23 to August 29, 2010."