On the Origin of Springs

Tomoko Kawai is a Japanese photo-based artist, lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Kawai focuses her artistic research on humans through exploratory activities in cultural history, philosophy and aesthetics, based on the sensations and experience that she gains through photography, including all kinds of physical activity and mobility.

On the Origin of Springs is her long-term project in Germany and Japan, which invites visitors to trace the artist’s perceptions through her exhibitions in Berlin and Tokyo and readers to follow her thoughts through a book with the same title. The whole project offers different traces of the artist’s developing research on the axes of rhythm, human existence, and the physical experience.

Material things, events, and organisms do not exist independently. Like circulating water, they are connected and move together in similar cycles. On the Origins of Springs connects a broad array of architectural, literary and historical elements to investigate relationships among humans, city, and nature, in an effort to reconsider the nature of humanity and what human life should be.

This publication was created by weaving kawai’s research materials, notes, and photographic images with archival images, book materials, texts, and documentation of her exhibition at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, Germany(2018). It was then reconstructed as a slide projection work and exhibited at Tokyo Photographic Art Museum in Tokyo, Japan(2019). On the Origin of Springs transforms from a project to a catalogue to a work of art.

Tomoko Kawai
http://tomokokawai.net