AKIRA KAWAHATA
Bio: AKIRA KAWAHATA is a New York-based Japanese visual artist working in expanded photography. His journey began in Nagoya at age seven, capturing sleeper trains under the night sky. Influenced by his grandfather’s post-1945 documentation of Japan’s evolving landscapes, Akira explores simplicity, imperfection, and clarity, merging Japanese classical and Western modernist beauty. Trained under Eikoh Hosoe at Tokyo Polytechnic University, he moved to New York to evolve beyond Japanese aesthetic forms of 'perfection'. He blends traditional and contemporary photographic techniques to explore how image worlds mediate the relationship between natural rhythms, societal structures, and human perception of time.
Thesis Exhibition
Artist Statement:
My work investigates time as both material and condition—an invisible force that shapes perception, trace, and embodiment. Through photographic processes, I make the invisible visible, rendering time palpable and transforming what exceeds perception into shared experience.
I approach time across cosmic, urban, and intimate scales. Through hours-long exposures, I hold slow-moving elements against the fast-paced landscape of compressed time, collapsing planetary and metropolitan temporalities into a single frame. By digitally cleaning archival negatives, I turn acts of repair into traces of duration, repetition, and the fragility of preservation. In still lifes, I follow the passage from nourishment to object, where desire, consumption, and loss quietly settle into form.
Photography functions in my practice not only as image-making, but as a temporal instrument—one that measures, accumulates, and withholds. Rooted in classical photographic training, my practice both resists and embraces technological acceleration by insisting on duration and material presence. By making time visible, I return to the human impulse to hold onto what inevitably passes.
AKIRA KAWAHATA
STRATO-, 2026
Chromogenic print
Courtesy of the artist
&
STRATO-, 2026
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of the artist
&
STRATO-, 2026
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of the artist
&
STRATO-, 2026
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of the artist
&
STRATO-, 2026
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of the artist
&
STRATO-, 2026
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of the artist
First Year Exhibition
AKIRA KAWAHATA
SELENO-
2016-1012-2151-1013-0332, 2016
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of the artist
&
AKIRA KAWAHATA
SELENO-
2015-0507-2345-0508-0509, 2015
Gelatin silver print
Courtesy of the artist