Eisaku Chinda “Record
Dates: Thursday, July 10, 2025 – Tuesday, August 5, 2025, 9:00 – 1600 Open daily
Venue: OM Art × Music (735-3 Higashishioji-cho, Shimogyo-ku, Kyoto, Kyoto)
Organizer: Gallery Fuyuzue / Curator: Nao Noguchi
This is the artist’s third photo exhibition, a group of works reorganized by adding newly photographed masterpieces to the works exhibited in Kyoto in June 2024.
Perhaps because of his experience of being conscious of “death” in the intensive care unit of a hospital after a serious illness, the artist often feels that he is more sincere about living than anyone else. And he continues to create works mainly in Kyoto in the hope that they will be of help to someone someday.
I am here now.
Someone is next to me.
Are we chewing on the happiness in front of us?
Are we taking care of the people in front of us?
Do we tend to forget them in our busy lives?
This is a record of the life of a writer who decided to live his life once again.
Gallery Fuyu-Ao Noguchi Nao
Two years have passed since then.
On June 1, 2022, I had a myocardial infarction.
At 2 am. Suddenly, I woke up with severe pain in my back and difficulty breathing. I thought I was going to die, but I had an important case to attend to this afternoon, and I knew I could not miss it, so I persevered and went to the hospital first thing in the morning.
I was grumbling and moaning, “I can’t die here, I can’t die here,” when I arrived at the hospital in the early afternoon. As a result, he survived, but one-third of his heart was necrotic. There was a blood clot in the tip of his heart, and he was kept on absolute bed rest.
While in the ICU, conscious of his mortality, he thought, “If I survive, I will make a work of art. I will live doing what I want.
On the day he was to be discharged from the hospital, his doctor told him, “You jumped over the Sanzu River and came back to this side, so please live your life with that intention.
I went outside. This is Nishi-Shinjuku, where skyscrapers line the streets. For the first time in a long time, I breathed fresh air, not circulated air. I felt that I was alive.
For several months after that, I worked while continuing hospital visits and rehabilitation, but one day I lost my job. I thought, “Oh, this is all right.” I can do whatever I want.
I moved to Kyoto to try living away from Tokyo, and as I walked around Kyoto with my camera hanging from my shoulder, I occasionally felt a beautiful light enveloping me in the ordinary streets and everyday life, as if I was being told “that’s all right” or “so not bad,” like the awareness I felt in a foreign country. I sometimes felt the blink of an eye in a foreign land, and recorded and knitted these works. I hope you will take a look at them.
Eisaku CHINDA
After suffering a myocardial infarction one day, he made a miraculous recovery. His photo book is scheduled to be published by Fuyuseisha in the winter of 2025.
Photography Exhibitions
June 2023 “MY TEA’S GONE COLD” at Yamafuku Japan (Kyoto)
June 2025 “Thinking, Between Earth and Earth” at Yamafuku Japan (Kyoto)
July 2025 “Record” at OM×Art Gallery, Kyoto
Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/chinda_eisaku/