New York’s Yoshii Gallery presents unpublished work from celebrated Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama in its latest exhibition, “Tokyo Meshed World.”The exhibition, which runs until June 25, 2016, features prints of the photographer’s work from 1975 to 1978. Moriyama has only recently begun to show the full extent of his archives for the 1970s in a handful of recent photobooks (including 2013’s “Mirage”) and exhibitions like 2015’s “Daido Moriyama in Color” in Milan.Whereas that exhibition focused on the artist’s rarer color work, “Tokyo Meshed World” displays photographs in the format Moriyama is perhaps best known for: silver gelatin prints. The exhibition showcases familiar subjects for the artist — the postmodern metropolis of mid-to-late-century Tokyo, mostly taken in the candid, blurry style that is Moriyama’s trademark.The exhibition title, “Tokyo Meshed World,” refers not only to the physical nature of these prints, “mesh” being a photographic term for the screens of small dots used to build the images when printed. It also alludes to how Tokyo at the time was increasingly becoming a mixture of traditional Japanese and western values: a “meshing” of east and west.In an image such as “Shinjuku,” 1977, Moriyama shows us a Tokyo sex shop whose façade has been painted with an image of Marilyn Monroe, the late starlet representing a western ideal of female sexuality used to entice people into the store. This is contrasted with a work like “Tokyo Meshed World,” 1978, where a mural of a nude Japanese girl — as much a fantasy as the image of Monroe — represents another side of the sexuality of the city. The exhibition is full of these images that show the contradictions of the city, a subject that fascinated the photographer from his days working on the revolutionary “Provoke” magazine in the ‘60s, and through the ‘70s and beyond.“Tokyo Meshed World” runs June 25 at Yoshii Gallery
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