Taro Masushio

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*Untitled (CB #6)*, 2024, UV print on found cardboard

*Untitled (CB #15)*, 2024, UV print on found cardboard

*Untitled (CB #10)*, 2024, UV print on found cardboard

Views of “Pass,” Empty Gallery, Hong Kong, 2024. Photo: South Ho.

‘Taro Masushio: Liar, Liar’, Ulrik, NYC, 2023

‘Taro Masushio: Rumor Has It’, Empty Ga, 2020

*Untitled 14*, 2020

Courtesy of the artist and Empty Gallery.

*Asagao 7*, 2020

Courtesy of the artist and Empty Gallery.

*Untitled 6*, 2020

Courtesy of the artist and Empty Gallery.

*Untitled 19*, 2020

Courtesy of the artist and Empty Gallery.

Born in Japan, Taro Masushio is an artist based in New York City. He received his BA from UC Berkeley and MFA from New York University and has taught at both institutions. He has held solo exhibitions at Empty Gallery (2024, 2020) and Ulrik; New York (2023). He has also exhibited at 47 Canal, Capsule Shanghai, Immanence, Pacific Film Archive, amongst others. He was the 2022/23 City Artist in Residence at Internationales Atelier-stipendium Mönchengladbach. In Fall 2024, he joined Cooper Union; New York as the Henry Wolf Chair in Photography.

PRESS:
Jaime Chu, ‘Taro Masushio Folds the Fictional In on Itself“, Spike Art Magazine
Wong Binghao, ‘Pass, Taro Masushio at Empty Gallery,’ Mousse

Taro Masushio_Bio CV
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Taro-Masushio-press
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2024-12-19	Xper.Xr, Condo London, Hot Wheels
	Xper.Xr will participating in a two-person exhibition with Delia Gonzalez at Hot Wheels Athens London, as part of Condo London, taking place 18 January through 15 February, 2025. Read more …
2024-12-07	Doris Guo, Legal Size, Gandt
	Organised by Olivia Shao, Legal Size is a group exhibition at Gandt, New York, from December 7 through February 9, 2025. Participating artists include: Richard Aldrich, George Brecht, Lyndon Barrois Jr., Elise Duryee-browner, Curie Choi, Franz Erhard Walther, Peter Fischli, Jef Geys, Doris Guo, Raymond Hains, Bradley Kronz, Matthew Langan Peck, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Aki Sasamoto, Enzo Shalom, Mike Smith and Rosemarie Trockel.
2024-11-26	Taro Masushio Folds the Fictional In on Itself, by Jaime Chu in Spike Art Magazine
	Amid his exhibition at Empty Gallery, Hong Kong, the Japanese bricolage photographer presents art as helping us sit with the discomfort of the unknown. In the last essay he published before passing away on 23 October 2024, Gary Indiana wrote about photographs: “We all live at least one or two lives that we subtract from our biographies. Areas of un-revisited, unhealed pain or such monumental nothingness that they’re not worth remembering. Then, infrequently, some evidence turns up, often photographic evidence. You are seized, suddenly, by a grisly species of curiosity.” Born in Japan and now living in New York, artist Taro Masushio’s exhibition “Pass” at Empty Gallery, Hong Kong is replete with photographic evidence, but contains little of facts and does not reward undue curiosity. Masushio’s reprinting of his father’s amateur travel photography on the cardboard of care packages shipped across the world from father to son conjures a haptic, material intimacy mediated by impersonal logistics networks. A series of sparing, high-contrast still-life photographs catalogues enigmatic objects sourced intuitively from his father’s belongings and the artist’s own collection – a book of Rimbaud’s poetry, a pair of male Ainu figurines, testosterone supplements, photo paper, a darkroom safe light. The effect is disruption of the impulse towards certainty in meaning-making, the recognizable objects utterly drained of their indexicality, despite their unambiguous familial, autobiographical, and sexual connotations. Read more …
2024-11-16	Taro Masushio, Pass, by Wong Binghao in Mousse Magazine
	“Just as he is uninterested in entrenching binaries of fact and fiction, resistance and capitulation, or authorship and appropriation, Taro Masushio is likewise wary of identitarian overdeterminations and the corollary imperative to verify and reveal any singular “truths” behind his photography. He sets himself the task of resisting the medium’s claims to the indisputable legibility of subjects in front of or behind its lens. His latest show at Empty Gallery, Hong Kong (all works 2024), juxtaposes two types of photography—UV prints on found cardboard and more traditional still lifes—to complicate the medium’s supposed technological purchase on truth and transparency. It highlights his proclivity for playful formal experimentation when faced with the camera’s potential for capture, which has often proven symptomatic of the colonial hunger for knowledge, order, and coherence. Through his shrewd sequencing of images, the artist seems to suggest that the medium of photography holds the capacity to conceal and equivocate, despite its presumed indexical fidelity to the “real.”” Read more …
2024-11-14	Para Site 2024 Benefit Auction
	Empty Gallery is pleased to support Para Site’s 2024 Benefit Auction. The works by Doris Guo & Weili Wang and James T. Hong are available to view on 9/F of H Queen’s in Hong Kong through 17 November, the silent auction will continue through November 20, 10.30pm HKT. Read more …
2024-11-06	H.G. Masters on James T. Hong at Empty Gallery
	In issue 141 of ArtAsiaPacific, deputy editor H.G. Masters covered James T. Hong’s Apologies, which was on view at Empty Gallery from June through August 2024. Read more …
2024-11-05	Intermissions: Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork & Laetitia Sonami at Renaissance Society, Chicago
	At the Renaissance Society, Gork develops a new project for the Intermissions series in collaboration with performer, sound artist, and electronic musician Laetitia Sonami. Directly engaging with this unique setting, Gork introduces new physical elements into the empty gallery space, positions multiple sound sources, and experiments with the room’s unusual acoustics. For two days, Sonami and Gork mobilize and shape the sound within this environment across various listening zones. Visitors are free to come and go during the durational performance. Curated by Karsten Lund with Michael Harrison Special thanks to Meyer Sound, Berkeley, CA. Read more …
2024-11-05	Vunkwan Tam collaborating with Winsome Wong and Annisa Cheung, HICCUP, Tai Kwun, Hong Kong
	On the weekend of November 8-9, Winsome Wong will present ‘Love Song: the bittersweet crumbs of having them at home’ in collaboration with Vunkwan Tam and Annisa Cheung, at Tai Kwun’s HICCUP, a festival of body and sound co-presented by Tai Kwun Contemporary, Contemporary Musiking Hong Kong (Sound Forms), and Per.Platform. For the full schedule, see the link below. Read more …
2024-11-01	Doris Guo, The Jar at K4, Oslo
	Doris Guo’s solo presentation, The Jar, is on view November 1st through 24th at K4 in Oslo, a non-profit gallery space for video art and moving image. The exhibition is open on Saturdays and Sundays, please see the link below for further details. “The starting point of this exhibition was based on my desire for having always wanted to make a horror movie. At many periods of my life, especially busy and stressful ones, I take comfort in throwing on any horror movie, cheesy and predictable with familiar sounds and jump scares. Amongst the many horror tropes one might experience, I particularly get a lot of enjoyment out of police and military being utterly useless. It’s an assumed, natural fact of the characters and by the general audience. I wanted to set my horror movie in a particular style of housing in the Pacific Northwest.” Read more …
2024-10-26	Cici Wu, Travel Star Between Ceasing and Arising, Scheusal Berlin
	Cici Wu’s solo exhibition Travel Star Between Ceasing and Arising is now on view at Scheusal Berlin from October 26th onwards.