All eyes on photo artist Lieko Shiga and her award-winning CANARY series, exhibition in Cologne

The Priska Pasquer gallery is pleased to present Japanese artist Lieko Shiga’s ‘Canary’ series. Lieko’s series was awarded the ‘Infinity Award / Young Photographer’ in 2009 by the International Center of Photography, New York.

In ‘Canary’, she connects personal stories about people, local myths, memories, emotions and experiences and the results are fantastic and bizarre scenarios.

The positively ‘peculiar’ nature of the series that oscillates between reality and dream reminds us a little bit of colonization efforts, ignoring cultural borders.

The series was shot in Brisbane, Australia, Singapore and in Northern Japan. In order to gain access to the citizens on location, Lieko published a questionnaire that prompted the recipients to tell of special places and the associated personal experiences and stories.

Both the close contact to the people as well as the locations they mentioned were the inspiration to the ‘Canary’ series, but it turned out to be her own little visual world after all. A world you can explore by yourself through her photographs.

"'I can already visualise the finished photograph when I first encounter the subject or scene, or even before that. The time that exists before the photograph is taken, shoots me where I stand outside, and restores me to life. The body is simply a medium, I kept a canary inside my stomach." says Lieko.

Most of her works are the result of a composition that was specifically created for the camera, for example, when she decorates a withered tree with thousands of paper flowers.

Lieko Shiga, born in Aichi in 1980, lives and works in Sendai, Japan. She studied at the Chelsea University of Art and Design, London and graduated in 2004 with a BA in Fine Arts New Media.


LIEKO SHIGA - CANARY
Galerie Priska Pasquer
Cologne