KYOKO HAMAGUCHI 

Long Stay 

April 29 – May 30, 2021

ATM Gallery NYC is pleased to announce Long Stay, the first New York solo exhibition by Kyoko Hamaguchi. 

Hamaguchi’s work addresses such essential concerns as place and time, ephemerality and permanence, movement and standstill. These themes are mostly explored via photography—a medium recording transitory moments that thus become lasting, if not permanent, visual notes.

The title of the exhibition might refer to Hamaguchi’s continuous stay in New York, the long exposure time of her photographs, or our stagnant situation during the current pandemic, but it could also refer to the passing nature of human existence or the transient nature of the artist’s own experience as an immigrant. 

The exhibition includes End to End (NYC Subway) (2017–18), made soon after Hamaguchi moved to New York in 2017. These twenty-three black-and-white photographic diptychs document her exploration of the city via a complete  

round trip on each of New York’s twenty-three subway lines. The pictures were taken with a handmade pinhole camera made of cardboard. Depending on the length of each trip, some offer more details of the subway cars than others, and the tones of white, black, and gray differ significantly. 

Two other works in the exhibition were also produced using self-made cameras to document movement and standstill: Postal Summary (2018–ongoing) and the site-specific Space Watcher (2018–ongoing). In the former, Hamaguchi covertly records the transport of common shipping boxes by turning those very boxes into cameras whose insides are covered with photo emulsion. Each box reveals a different abstract image of its journey depending on the duration of the shipment, the specific movements, and its exposure to light. Space Watcher is a companion piece of sorts. A pinhole camera is made of drywall and placed in the corner of the gallery. The inside of the box is covered with photo emulsion and records a long exposure of the entire run of the exhibition.

Also on view are a selection of works from Hamaguchi’s Time Medium (2017), a series of paired photographs and paintings where each photograph depicts the process of making the painting. This series is inspired by the Japanese word yaku, which describes the actions of both firing ceramics (in this case a vase) and developing photographs.

The most recent work on view is her series Sanctuary (2020), consisting of hand sanitizer dispensers in which the artist carefully placed colored threads in the shapes of various houses. The more the dispensers are used, the more the shapes of the houses change, until they completely disappear when the sanitizing gel runs out.

Kyoko Hamaguchi (b. Tokyo, 1989) currently lives and works in New York. In 2020 she received her MFA from Hunter College; she also holds a BFA from Tokyo University of the Arts. Her first solo exhibition took place at KOKI ARTS, Tokyo, in 2020, and her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions at such venues as WhiteBox, New York (2020); the Museum of Modern Art, Gunma, Japan (2015); and the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum (2015), among others.