Ken Kitano, who was born in 1968, has been working on the ‘Our Face’ project since 1999. Beginning in his native Japan, he portrays members of social groups, associations, clubs or professions – for instance lawyers, athletes or ricksha pullers.
A conceptual approach such as this was pioneered by August Sander, whose Weimar typology ‘Face of our Time’ was published back in 1929. Unlike Sander, however, Ken Kitano’s work does not depict individuals belonging to a group, but rather compresses portraits of a group into a single print, in which the portraits (up to several dozen individual shots) are copied upon one another, layer upon layer.
This montage process causes the subjects’ bodies to merge to a ghostly outline, while their faces lose their individuality. The portraits congeal into the final portrait of a group which Kitano terms ‘Our Face’. Furthermore, each ‘group portrait’ allows the artist to convey a unique sense of time and light.
Initially, Kitano concentrated on groups in Japan. Since 2008, he has extended the ‘Our Face’ project to people in Asia. The Galerie Priska Pasquer exhibition features portraits from Japan, China, India, Korea, Indonesia and Thailand.
Through Kitano’s special image production technique and the linear positioning of the pictures, he succeeds in levelling out perceived ranks within a group and the hierarchies that hold sway within the individual societies, but also between countries and peoples. In the age of globalisation, Kitano strives to describe the world as an accumulation of localities that are of equal worth, while often differing fundamentally in their mindsets, cultures and customs:
“‘Globalisation’ sounds like a structure where homogeneous people and a single ideology exist centring around one ‘centre’. … There is no such thing as ‘the centre’ in this world. I imagine the world to be composed of many localities. The aim of this project is to help to re-cast the meaning of ‘globalisation’ as the accumulation of individuals and the localities…” (Ken Kitano)
Brief biography
Lives in Tokyo, where he was born in 1968. 1991 Graduated from Nihon University’s College of Industrial Technology. Freelance photographer since 2003. Won the ‘Society of Photography Award’ in 2004 and the ‘Newcomer’s Award’ of the Photographic Society of Japan in 2007.
