Summer Xu

Gin-en Joyu Summer Xu╱Nobuyoshi Araki

In January 2019, Gin-en Joyu Summer Xu opened at artspace AM in Tokyo on Xu Qing’s fiftieth birthday. The exhibition and accompanying photobook marked the continuation of a photographic relationship that began in the 1990s and returned to the studio in the autumn of 2018.

Xu arrived without makeup, wearing her own everyday clothes and carrying a suitcase filled with pieces from her personal wardrobe. Music, conversation, laughter and the rhythm of Araki’s shutter gradually transformed the session. She moved between playful gestures, stillness, theatrical intensity and tears, allowing the experience of a professional actress and the vulnerability of a private individual to occupy the same frame.

The title joins two Japanese expressions: ginmaku joyu, the classical “silver-screen actress,” and gin-en shashin, silver-halide photography. Monochrome portraits are interwoven with vividly coloured Polaroids of flowers. Throughout Araki’s work, flowers carry associations with desire, mortality and the heightened beauty of things approaching disappearance. Here they function as visual punctuation, shifting the emotional temperature between portraits.

The 16 cm square, accordion-bound volume can be read page by page or unfolded into a continuous strip. Its sequence evokes a film reel, a contact sheet and a portable exhibition. Within this compact object, age appears as lived experience: an actress choosing how to face the camera at fifty, and a late-career photographer continuing to preserve fleeting life through analogue images.

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