PROPS from Barakei: Eikoh Hosoe and Jason Wee

This exhibition presents artist Jason Wee’s new conceptual sculptural installation and performance, commissioned by the Museum and conceived in response to the series Barakei (Ordeal by Roses) by the Japanese photographer Eikoh Hosoe (1933–2024). Between autumn 1961 and spring 1962, Hosoe staged images of the novelist Yukio Mishima (1925–1970) in Tokyo, primarily at the author’s Spanish colonial–style home. Wee’s work focuses on the props—a garden hose, a mallet, a candle, a painterly backdrop accentuating Mishima’s muscular body—that imbue Hosoe’s photographs with an ambiguous symbolism reflective of art historical and sexual narratives. The installation incorporates metal and fabric prints of similar props, mounted within a spiral of rope and suspended on a fragmented wall frame. The rope’s pattern is based on an encoded version of a lecture script by Wee (audible on headphones within the exhibition); it speaks to and activates the historical photographs, many of which are from the Museum’s collection.

Hosoe’s collaboration with Mishima yielded the landmark photobook Barakei, published in 1963. Its images reveal the volatility of the era: the daring work of Japanese postwar artists; student protests in response to the 1960 Japan–US Security Treaty, the economic miracle, and the American War in Vietnam; and reactionary desires to return to prewar traditional values. Before Hosoe’s camera, Mishima performed as directed, and he later remarked that “neither my spirit nor my psyche was required ... the experience made my heart dance.” He felt Hosoe’s photographs let him inhabit a “grotesque, barbaric, and dissipated” inner world shot through with “a pure undercurrent of lyricism”; in Hosoe’s recollection, “Mishima allowed me to act on my own discretion, including wrapping a rubber hose around his body or inserting a closeup of his eye in Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus.” References to the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian give Hosoe’s high-contrast photographs an especially dark and decadent mood. Less than a decade later, in November 1970, Mishima would commit ritualistic seppuku.

The exhibition also traces Hosoe’s photographs across three editions of the photobook, designed by Kohei Sugiura (1963), Tadanori Yokoo (1971), and Kiyoshi Awazu (1984). Wee’s installation accentuates the continuing resonance of this historic collaboration.

Eikoh Hosoe (1933–2024) counts among the most influential photographers of Japan’s vibrant postwar avant-garde. Born Toshihiro Hosoe to a Shinto priest, he grew up in Tokyo under US occupation; later, he conceived the pen name “Eikoh” from the character for ei, or “English.” After graduating from the Tokyo College of Photography, Hosoe founded the Vivo photo collective, an influential group that eschewed realist documentary photography for surreal, expressive, frequently staged scenes. Hosoe is perhaps most known for his collaborations with avant-garde Japanese artists such as Butoh founder and choreographer Tatsumi Hijikata (1928–1986). In 1995, Hosoe helped found the Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts, Yamanashi, where he served as director through the end of his life.

Jason Wee (b. 1979) is an interdisciplinary artist and writer working between New York and Singapore whose practice spans photography, installation, architecture, poetry, and archival research. His work has been exhibited internationally, including in Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Singapore Biennale, and Changwon Sculpture Biennale. He is the founder and director of Grey Projects, an artist-run library and residency program in Singapore, and the author of five poetry books, including From A (Undesirable) Diary (2023), a Singapore Literature Prize finalist, and In Short, Future Now (2021),  a Gaudy Boy Poetry Prize finalist.