Shigeta Kobayashi｜plateau

From January 17 (Fri) to February 8 (Sat) 2025, LAG is excited to present “plateau,” an exhibition of work by Shigeta Kobayashi.
Kobayashi is a photographer with a particular interest in natural occurrences and vestiges of human endeavor. After seeing first-hand a plethora of natural forms during a 2018 stay in Iceland, he became interested in geological phenomena, and has woven this perspective through his practice ever since.
The new series “plateau” on display at this exhibition was shot amid the vast wilderness of Kumanodaira in the northern Japan Alps.
There are times when that originally destined to remain unseen, is for some reason exposed and rendered visible.
Fascinated by the phenomenon known in geology as an “outcrop,” Kobayashi turned his attention to a range of natural forms arising over many years and exposed in ways unique to each location, such as the pools of water known as chito that emerge in alpine bogs; rocks laid bare on tableland as remnants of volcanic eruption, and trees sculpted in peculiar ways by the action of blizzards.
By presenting all these through the medium of photography, this unmissable exhibition challenges our ideas around the distance between humans and nature, and human attitudes to nature.
The photo collection plateau published by Kobayashi’s “books cairn” publishing label (printed by LIVE ART BOOKS) will be on sale at the gallery. A talk featuring guest Ito Jiro, manager of the Kumanodaira Mountain Hut is also scheduled during the exhibition.

—Artist Statement—

During a residency at Kumonodaira Mountain Hut in the Northern Alps of Japan, I was intrigued by the various shapes of the ponds scattered around the area. Kumonodaira is located on a gentle lava plateau at the source of the Kurobe River in the Hida Mountains, and I learned that ponds formed in marshes in such a unique environment are called chito. Two years later, when I revisited Kumonodaira again, my attention this time was drawn to the shapes of rocks and trees.
Looking at the ponds, rocks, and trees, I couldn’t help but think about the natural phenomena that had given them their shape and the time it took for them to form. At the same time, such an ordinary and somewhat borrowed attitude towards nature seemed to connect to a single intersection within myself, no matter how natural it may be, when I recalled the path I had walked to get there and the family I had been with until yesterday.
While the nature of the Northern Alps seems far removed from our daily lives, I hope that these forms, which are unmistakably connected to everyday life, will help us to feel closer to events in distant places and things difficult to sense by only imagining them.

Shigeta Kobayashi