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SEPTEMBER 2021 • INAUGURAL ISSUE
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Photographic works by Soshi
Matsunobe
Left: “Ghost of Copy (Gray)#56” (2021), inkjet print on
semi-gloss paper, 40.4 x 59.4
centimeters (15.9 x 23.39inches)
Right: “Ghost of Copy (Gray)#15” (2021), inkjet print on
semi-gloss paper, 40.4 x 59.4
centimeters (15.9 x 23.39inches).
Photos courtesy of the artist andThe Container, Tokyo.

SOSHI MATSUNOBE’S NEGATIVE-POSITIVE VISIONby Edward M. Gómez
This year, Tokyo experienced a summer marked by on-again, off-again sunshine or on-again, off-again rain, depending
on how one chose to measure Mother Nature’s mercurial temperament. What’s dry was wet, and what’s wet was dry.
Similarly, the young artist Soshi Matsunobe, who was born in 1988 and lives and works in Shiga Prefecture, insouthwestern Japan, confounds viewers with his clever mixing-up of negative and positive photographic images in
the making of his collage-like pictures. In addition, often he purposefully mutes the contrast of his black-and-white
images to give them a soft, meditative character. His photographic works can feel energetic, calm and calming, andbeguiling, all at the same time.
Through October 11, 2021, they may be seen in Ghost of Copy, an exhibition at The Container, one of Tokyo’s
must-see outposts for experimental and conceptual art. Founded by the Israeli-British independent curator ShaiOhyaon, this offbeat contemporary-art gallery is housed in a replica of a standard, half-length shipping container.
This little box of a venue is tucked inside Bross Tokyo, a cutting-edge hair salon in a stylish city that takes the art ofcreative coiffure rather seriously. The gallery and the salon are located near Nakameguro Station, one terminus of theHibiya metro line in west-central Tokyo, a hip neighborhood filled with cafés, small boutiques and what seems like asurfeit of dentists’ offices, dry cleaners — and hair salons.
Matsunobe is presenting his photographic works in an
unusual manner: His exhibition consists of an old-fashioned, 35mm-carousel slide projector that has beenplaced on a pedestal. Set on automatic rotation, it
projects slide-film photographs of his original digital
photographs directly onto an empty steel wall at one endof The Container’s interior. Only a couple of framed,on-paper prints accompany this installation to givevisitors a sense of how the artist’s photographic images
appear when presented in a more conventional manner.

The artist Soshi Matsunobe (left) and Shai Ohayon (in thebackground, seated), the founder-director-curator of The
Container, Tokyo, setting up the Ghost of Copy exhibition.
Photo by brutjournal.

“I had to find a professional lab that was able to prepare
my original digital photographs as slides and then mountthem for use in the projector,” Matsunobe said when heand Ohayon were installing the exhibition, which openedin late July. The artist added, “No one uses slide film
anymore!”He explained that he shoots images of scenes from his
everyday life in an agricultural region of Japan, and ofobjects in his studio and a ceramics workshop in which healso spends time. The compositions of his photographic
works are made up of alternating or juxtaposed, negativeand positive black-and-white passages. The play of suchopposing elements gives his compositions a certain
rhythmic pulse, even as Matsunobe’s intentional mutingof tones — there are no high, strong contrasts in hispictures — serves to slow them down. In his exhibition,eighty images flicker by in a looped projection, whose
overall character feels as ephemeral as his pictures areuncertain and ghostly.

Photographic works by Soshi Matsunobe
Left: “Ghost of Copy (Gray) #60” (2021), inkjet print on
semi-gloss paper, 40.4 x 59.4 centimeters (15.9 x 23.39inches).
Right: “Ghost of Copy (Gray) / Negative Sheet” (2021),
inkjet print on milk-white film, 28.3 x 35 x 8 centimeters(11.14 x 13.78 x 3.15 inches).
Photos courtesy of the artist and The Container, Tokyo.

In a pamphlet published to accompany the exhibition, Ohayon writes,“Soshi Matsunobe is in a perpetual search to capture the intangible. […]Over the last decade, he [has] created works in sculpture, installation,
drawing, and photography with a clear interest in the physicality of spaces,or lack thereof.” He notes that the artist has a keen eye and deep sense of
appreciation for “the rarely discussed beauty of the most mundane,
everyday objects — from boxes and rubber bands to stones.”
Ghost of Copy serves up spectral images of a rice paddy; dandelions;a glass-front cabinet standing upside-down, like some kind of slain or
toppled animal; large concrete structures; and other subjects. In addition
to the projected images, Matsunobe is displaying “Ghost of Copy (Gray)/Negative Sheet” (2021), a grid-format collage resembling a black-andwhite roll of film’s printed contact sheet. This work serves as a visualsummary of all of the images that appear in the slide-projected exhibition.
Ohayon sees this survey of Matsunobe’s photographic works as what hecalls “a kind of virtual sketchbook.”
The artist said, modestly, “I hope that viewers will enjoy looking at my photographs, and that these images might help them to slow down and think
appreciatively and maybe a bit philosophically about the nature of everyday
things that we normally take for granted.”

Installation view of Soshi
Matsunobe’s Ghost of Copy
exhibition at The Container,
Tokyo. Photo by brutjournal.

Soshi Matsunobe: Ghost of Copy
on view through October 11, 2021 at The Container
Hills Daikanyama, Floor 1
1-8-30 Kamimeguro, Meguro-ku
Tokyo 153-0051 Japan
info@the-container.com
Website of artist Soshi Matsunobe
www.matsunobe.net
Website of The Container, Tokyo
www.the-container.com

brutjournal

Website of Bross Tokyo
www.bross-hair.com