Rika Noguchi
“ Person Diving ”
1996Grand Prize
ARTIST STATEMENT
Person Diving
Photos are keys to solving riddles.
Creation is a journey.
Works are logic.
A coincidental reality that always goes beyond all that.
This is a record of a person diving.
And, this is my record.
It was a winter day, when I first encountered the diver.
That figure looked like someone going to the moon.
It was mysterious.
I thought about the act of diving.
I will continue to shoot photos. For the sake of the 99% of the riddles that dominate daily life.
Selecting judge: Kaoru Izima
First, there’s astonishment. From the bizarreness of the figure, it seems like an alien, kind of like,“ What is this person? ” Then you catch the situation that Oh, it’s a person diving and look at it normally, but the astonishment and freshness are accurately expressed. Even if people observing don’t understand the concept and way of thinking, they can look at it absentmindedly and enjoy it. It works well as a photo. To put it another way, even if you don’t understand the concept, it has an attractive presence as a photo.
PROFILE
Rika Noguchi
Rika Noguchi, born in 1971 in the city of Saitama, now resides in Naha, Okinawa. She started creating photographic works in 1992. Exhibitions are her main form of presenting her work, and she has participated in many international contemporary art exhibitions. She won the Grand Prize at the 1996 New Cosmos of Photography and received a New Artist Award (Arts category) at the 52nd Minister of Education Awards for Fine Arts in 2002.
Some of her major exhibitions in Japan include a feeling of something happening (Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art, Kagawa, 2001), I Dreamt of Flying (Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, 2004), and Light Reaching the Future (Izu Photo Museum, Shizuoka, 2011 – 2012). Her works have been added to the public collections at The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, The National Museum of Art, Osaka, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Centre Georges-Pompidou, Paris, and other museums.
1996Grand Prize