THE LOST DECADE
HIROH KIKAI
WORDS BY JEPPE UGELVIG
OUT NOW
ISSUE 43 FW23
KALEIDOSCOPE's Fall/Winter 2023 issue launches with a set of six covers. Featuring Sampha, Alex Katz, Harmony Korine, a report into the metamorphosis of denim, a photo reportage by Dexter Navy, and a limited-edition cover by Isa Genzken.
Also featured in this issue: London-based band Bar Italia (photography by Jessica Madavo and interview by Conor McTernan), the archives of Hysteric Glamour (photography by Lorenzo Dalbosco and interview by Akio Kunisawa), Japanese underground illustrator Yoshitaka Amano (words by Alex Shulan), Marseille-based artist Sara Sadik (photography by Nicolas Poillot and interview by Daria Miricola), a survey about Japan’s new hip-hop scene starring Tohji (photography by Taito Itateyama and words by Ashley Ogawa Clarke), Richard Prince’s new book “The Entertainers” (words by Brad Phillips), “New Art: London” (featuring Adam Farah-Saad, Lenard Giller, Charlie Osborne, R.I.P. Germain, and Olukemi Ljiadu photographed by Bolade Banjo and interviewed by Ben Broome).
FROM THE CURRENT ISSUE: ISA GENZKEN
FROM THE PREVIOUS ISSUE
MANIFESTO
From June 22 to June 24 during Men’s Fashion Week in Paris, KALEIDOSCOPE and GOAT presented the new edition of our annual arts and culture festival, MANIFESTO. Against the unique setting of the French Communist Party building, a modern architectural landmark designed by legendary Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, the festival will bring together visionary creators from different areas of culture across three days of art, fashion and sound.
FROM THE SHOP
CAPSULE PLAZA
In April 2023, a year after the launch of the magazine, Capsule introduced Capsule Plaza, a new initiative that infuses new energy into Milan Design Week by redefining the design showcase format. A hybrid between a fair and a collective exhibition, Capsule Plaza brings together designers and companies from various creative fields, bridging industry and culture with a bold curation that spans interiors and architecture, beauty and technology, ecology and craft.
MARK FLOOD
1017 ALYX 9SM
In January 2023, KALEIDOSCOPE presented a solo exhibition by Houston-based artist Mark Flood (b. 1957), curated by Alessio Ascari, at Spazio Maiocchi in Milan. In his paintings, Flood deploys the detritus of contemporary culture—slogans, celebrities, logos, and memes—to mock American society and the elitist art world. The exhibition also provided the scenography for the runway presentation of the 1017 ALYX 9SM Fall/Winter 2023 collection.
FROM THE ARCHIVE
Over four decades, Japanese photographer Hiroh Kikai has captured the portraits of people who passed by the Sensō-ji Buddhist Temple in Tokyo’s Asakusa district.
“I’ve concluded that Asakusa is a mysterious neighborhood,” noted Hiroh Kikai in his diary in March 1998. He was referring to an overlooked district in Tokyo, once a pleasure and entertainment district that serviced the governing Tokugawa shogunate. After the Edo period, it had fallen out of the city’s consciousness: except for the enormous and well-frequented Buddhist temple Sensō-ji, not much was happening in this urban backwater at the turn of the millennium. It was the height of the Japan’s “lost decade,” after all, the economic depression that followed a meteoritic postwar ascent, casting the newly established Asian superpower into a strange haze of melancholy. Perhaps Kikai, who roamed the temple grounds in search of subjects to photograph, understood the intense significance of this—at least, he begged to differ when it came to Asakusa: “This is still a neighborhood full of people seeking a livelihood on a peculiarly personal level. So many of the people I see there wear the stories of their lives in their visage and bearing. A unique story hangs around each of them like a cloak, and fires my imagination. Silently, as they pass by, they give me a yet another glimpse of a distinctively human drama.”
Kikai was a purist in the very best sense, devoting his entire practice to the universality that is the “human drama” and, more specifically, the possibility of capturing it through the image. Far too humble, and focused, to ever pose as a conceptualist or social documentarian, his work nonetheless distilled the highest qualities of both, procuring grand emotional narratives out of chance encounters on the street. That he spent most of his career in the Sensō-ji’s vicinity was a question of convenience—it was close to his home, and there were always lots of people. He would often annotate his images, suggesting open-ended narratives: a man reading his fortune carefully from end to end, a woman who wasn’t looking for a long-term employment contract any time soon. Why venture further if his camera found all it needed there, humanity itself cloaked in the intense idiosyncrasies of attire, physiognomy, body language, expression? Each human, so impossibly heavy with meaning, with history.
In university, Kikai studied philosophy; afterward, he worked as a truckdriver. He detested cinema, praising it only when broken into stills, and he adored Diane Arbus. When, in 1969, he discovered a Hasselblad for sale at a discounted rate, he successfully convinced his old professor, the philosopher Sadayoshi Fukuda, to lend him the money. By the mid-1980s, he had settled for his location (Sensō-ji’s red walls offering a distinctive muffled gray when translated into black-and-white) and established “game rules” that he stuck to until his death: subjects should be passersby and photographed from the knee up, in square format; no recognizable designer clothes should be visible as it would identify the picture too closely with a specific time. Fashion, then, sits at the heart of Kikai’s work, namely as a problem—an issue in the way of timelessness.
Jeppe Ugelvig (b. 1993) is a curator, historian, and cultural critic based in California. His first book, Fashion Work: 25 Years of Art in Fashion was published in 2020.
Hiroh Kikai (1945–2020) was a Japanese photographer best known for his series of monochrome photographs depicting scenes and people in the Asakusa area of Tokyo.
IMAGE COURTESY: NANZUKA, TOKYO