YUKI TAWADA

YUKI TAWADA
Sep 22, 2026 – Nov 7, 2026

United States United States — Art Gallery
526 West 26th Street, Suite 814
New York, NY 10001

Alison Bradley Projects presents YUKI TAWADA, on view from 22 September through 7 November 2026, marking the artist's first solo exhibition in the United States. The show brings together representative works from Tawada's oeuvre, each one dismantling photography's claim to objective truth through acts of burning, piercing, cutting, and transferring.

Tawada treats the photograph not as a finished image but as a material site where memory can be created, changed, and released. In her ID (cherry blossoms) series, analog prints are punctured and scraped, leaving residues of the artist's hand visible. Absence registers as light; the image acquires volume and moves into space. These interventions are not destruction but inquiry, methods by which time reveals itself layer by layer, leaving behind what she calls bruised memories.

A central work is Lachrymatory (2021-ongoing), a collaborative project with ceramicist Fuku Fukumoto. Participants bring family photographs tied to memories they wish to relinquish or preserve. The photographs are burned, and the ashes are mixed into glaze applied to small ceramic vessels modeled on ancient tear-catchers. The photograph passes from image to ash to object: its representational content disappears while its material and spirit remain, absorbed into a collective ritual of remembrance.

The exhibition coincides with Tawada's inclusion in I'm So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now, a major retrospective at the International Center of Photography opening this fall. Born in Hamamatsu in 1978, Tawada studied biotechnology at Tohoku University before turning to photography at Camberwell College of Arts in London. She completed a PhD in Intermedia Art at Tokyo University of the Arts and now teaches at Kyoto University of the Arts.

Her work is held in the collections of the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Through her practice, photography becomes neither a vehicle for preserving the past nor a stable representation of it, but a mutable, embodied form open to transmission—a medium concerned not with recording what exists, but with engaging what is still becoming.

Image: ID (cherry blossoms 1_2), 2022, inkjet print scratched by router and sandpaper © Yuki Tawada. Courtesy of the artist and Alison Bradley Projects


AAP Magazine Travels 2026
 

expand_circle_rightAll Photography Exhibitions


Win a Solo Exhibition in November
 

expand_circle_rightFind Your Next Exhibition

All About Photo has curated the top photography exhibitions, including special events and must-see shows. Search by exhibition name, or filter by country, state, and city to find shows near you.
Search by location:

expand_circle_rightMore Events To Come