Following PARIS PHOTO 2024, we are pleased to host a collective exhibition : Miho Kajioka, one of our top japanese photograph, and Paul Cupido, who recently joined our artists portfolio. DO NOTE THAT SEVERAL PIECES OF THIS EXHIBITION WERE SHOWN AT OUR PARIS PHOTO 2024 boot.

One, a Japanese from Okayama, has seduced, Europe with her photographic refinement awarded the Nadar prize in 2019. The other, a native of the Netherlands, feeds on poetry, Japanese philosophy and Zen Buddhism to compose his hallucinated stories. Miho Kajioka and Paul Cupido are on the walls of the Polka gallery this winter. Their exhibition is unique and brings together nearly a hundred prints juxtaposed for the occasion. A fruitful dialogue between two sailors in the photo who share the same compass. “In Japanese, “the starry night” is written hoshizukiyo,” says Kajioka. It is interesting to see that the moon — zuki — is omnipresent in this translation, it is somehow consubstantial with the idea of starry night, as in the painting by Van Gogh. That’s why I designed this exhibition as an inner journey into space, inspired by the mental representation of night, moon and stars.” Miho Kajioka’s «cosmic poem» is told through a variation of tanzaku prints, this particular form made up of a vertical strip of paper with dimensions deemed perfect for writing poems, and whose first examples date from the fourteenth century. “To make wishes come true, tanzaku are also hung on bamboo branches during the Japanese star festival, Tanabata,” she says. The Moon, this space mystery that observes us in this vast sky of ink, and which gave its reason to science fiction, is also omnipresent in Paul Cupido just landed on the planet Polka with his extraterrestrial language. “On a pilgrimage between Tokyo and Abashiri on the island of Hokkaido, I discovered the Zen concept of “Mu” which expresses a notion of emptiness, often associated in the West with something negative. Yet it is full of potential because stripping is a door to creation.” For Paul Cupido, the moon is an existential symbol. It curls man into the infinitely small. At the same time it connects him, through this bond of which it has the secret, to the infinitely great, guiding in the night the captains of ships and all dreamers. In Praise of the Shadow, an essay on Japanese aesthetics, writer Junichiro Tanizaki says of these papers that when light falls upon them, they are almost embraced by them. With their fragile trials, in a full moon night dotted with stars, Miho Kajioka and Paul Cupido have shaped a corpus of images that shine in the dark and dialogue in an astonishing stellar conversation.