SHOJI UEDA

Under the influence of the Western avantgarde, Japanese photographer Shoji Ueda created decades of filmic, dreamlike works, often posing subjects on the sand dunes near his home. Following his wife's death in 1983, Ueda ceased photographing until later that year, when he agreed to make a picture of the catalog of fashin designer Takeo Kikuchi's work. Ueda's forays into fashion work, at the age of seventy, returned him to photography and his beloved dunes. "His style of mise-en-scene madehis photography instantly compatible with the fashin world," says Masako Sato, curator of a retrospective of 150 of Ueda's early and late images, at Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, Beijing, which "embody his playful mind and the experimental spirit that he maintained throughout his life."