Special Exhibition “in Vitro? in Vivo! YOSHIHIRO TATSUKI × THE UNIVERSITY MUSEUM, THE UNIVERSITY OF TOKYO”

2024.10.26-2025.01.19
GREY CUBE

Exhibition update notice:
All photographs on display in this special exhibition will be replaced with monochrome version.

Dates: 2025.1.4sat−1.19sun

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The JP Tower Museum INTERMEDIATHEQUE (IMT) will be holding a special exhibition “in Vitro? in Vivo! YOSHIHIRO TATSUKI × THE UNIVERSITY MUSEUM, THE UNIVERSITY OF TOKYO”.
Yoshihiro Tatsuki, a photographer. Since his debut with a photo collection “A Fallen Angel” in 1965, he has been active at the forefront for 60 years. While he has released many works capturing actresses, he has also photographed intensively the era without being limited to a specific genre, such as the families of famous people, people in disaster-stricken areas, and the national treasure Toji Temple. One place that has long interested him is museum. The location for “A Fallen Angel”, which he shot in his 20s, was a museum in Ueno, and at the age of 86, it was the space lined with academic specimens and historical fixtures - the University Museum, the University of Tokyo. This time, Tatsuki photographed a group of academic specimens collected at the museum.
The title is “in Vitro? in Vivo!”. “in Vitro” means“ in a test tube,” and “in Vivo” means “in a living organism,” and refers to the reaction system that takes place in an artificial environment in physiology and the reaction system that actually occurs inside a living organism. While the specimens stored in museums are sealed away from the real world, yet they become living beings once again by being exhibited in museums and photographed through a viewfinder. This title offers the viewer an opportunity to consider how academic specimens can be reinterpreted as art, beyond being mere research subjects.
In Yoshihiro Tatsuki's photographs, the subjects, who are supposed to have no body temperature, seem to exude expressions that can only be seen there. While capturing naturalistic and philosophical contrasts such as life and death, academia and art, nature and artificial, classification and coexistence - even academic specimens starts depicting personal stories, as he describes as “they are still alive”

Organizer: The University Museum, The University of Tokyo (UMUT)
Cosponsors: Yoyogi Seminar, BLAST Co., Ltd.
Support: Canon Marketing Japan Inc., Achievement Corporation, Tatsuki Yoshihiro Office
Planning: Department of Intermediatheque, The University Museum, The University of Tokyo (UMUT) , Kokohibi LLC