Fading into Fullness
An exhibition by Christophe Guye Galerie
With works by: Linus Bill, Anthony Friedkin, Stephen Gill, Erik Madigan Heck, Syoin Kajii, Rinko Kawauchi, Jung Lee, Lieko Shiga, Emma Summerton, Risaku Suzuki, Miroslav Tichy, Albert Watson, and John Yuyi.
There is a moment, brief and luminous, when spring fades into summer — when the world slows, warms, and expands. Fading into Fullness explores this seasonal and emotional threshold through the lens of contemporary photography. Gathering thirteen international artists, the exhibition reflects on time, transition, and impermanence — echoing the Japanese aesthetic sensibilities of wabi-sabi and mono no aware.
At the heart of the exhibition lies a shared interest in subtle transformation: in how light, texture, and form shift as one season gives way to another — and how these changes are felt not only in nature, but in ourselves. The works explore states of anticipation, saturation, and suspension: moments where the world becomes briefly heightened, where perception sharpens and inner states become visible.
Rinko Kawauchi’s delicate compositions, Risaku Suzuki’s luminous cherry blossoms, and Syoin Kajii’s meditative seascapes offer visual studies of natural impermanence. Lieko Shiga and Stephen Gill examine memory, place, and the traces of lived experience, while artists such as Erik Madigan Heck, Emma Summerton, and John Yuyi work with the body, presence, and performance — constructing images that reflect emotional states as much as aesthetic ones.
From Jung Lee’s glowing text sculptures to the analogue interventions of Linus Bill and the quiet monumentality of Anthony Friedkin’s surf images, Fading into Fullness brings together photographic practices that are formally diverse yet conceptually aligned. It is an exhibition about thresholds — between image and memory, control and chance, nature and figure, seeing and feeling.
In a time often dominated by speed and excess, Fading into Fullness invites viewers to consider the quieter intensities of becoming: the fullness of what is still unfolding.
Linus Bill
Born in 1982 in Switzerland, Linus Bill works at the intersection of photography, printmaking, and painting. Together with Adrien Horni, he has developed a unique collaborative practice that treats printed matter not only as a means of reproduction but as a primary artistic form. Bill’s solo works often begin with small-scale photographic source material — frequently mundane, found, or appropriated — which he enlarges and overpaints, resulting in hybrid pieces that blur the line between image and surface.
Trained at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), Bill has exhibited widely in Europe, often in dialogue with print culture and contemporary strategies of image-making. His work questions notions of authorship, layering, and scale, and reflects on how images operate in circulation versus isolation. In his silkscreen and acrylic pieces, flatness and depth compete, revealing a complex relationship between photography and abstraction.
Anthony Friedkin
Born in 1949 in Los Angeles, Anthony Friedkin is known for his long-term documentary projects exploring Californian subcultures, urban environments, and coastal life. While he is celebrated for series like The Gay Essay, his photographs of surfers and the ocean remain among his most iconic and enduring images.
Shot primarily in the 1970s and 1980s, Friedkin’s surf photographs capture more than just the sport — they reveal a way of life marked by ritual, rhythm, and a deep connection to the natural world. His black-and-white prints often depict solitary figures in vast seascapes, moments of pause, or the abstract forms of waves and surfboards in soft light. These works reflect both formal clarity and a deep humanism.
Friedkin remains committed to analogue photography and traditional darkroom printing. His practice embodies a devotion to timing, patience, and the poetic qualities of the everyday.
Stephen Gill
Stephen Gill, born in 1971 in Bristol, UK, is an artist who works extensively with photography, often incorporating found materials, local ephemera, and environmental interventions into his process. His approach is deeply rooted in place and personal experience, resulting in bodies of work that feel both investigative and intuitive.
Since relocating to rural Sweden, Gill has continued to explore relationships between nature, memory, and photographic materiality. His practice frequently involves unconventional techniques — burying prints, adding elements to negatives, or allowing natural forces to alter the image surface. Series such as Hackney Wick, Best Before End, and Coexistenceexemplify this approach.
Gill's work is known for its quiet radicalism and its ability to reframe the everyday. Whether urban or pastoral, his photographs evoke a sense of presence, of time embedded in matter, and of the slow unfolding of meaning through looking.
Erik Madigan Heck
Born in 1983 in Excelsior, Minnesota, Erik Madigan Heck is a photographer whose lush, painterly images often sit at the intersection of fashion, fine art, and classical aesthetics. Drawing inspiration from Romantic painting, Symbolism, and early color photography, Heck creates visually rich compositions that emphasize texture, tone, and dreamlike atmosphere.
A regular contributor to publications such as The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, and Numéro, Heck has also produced several books and fine art series that explore themes of beauty, nature, and the constructed image. His use of color is particularly distinctive — often saturated, soft-edged, and evocative of historical processes such as Autochrome.
Rather than documenting, Heck composes: his images are highly stylized, often idealized visions that invite reflection on representation, illusion, and the sensorial power of color.
John Yuyi
John Yuyi, born in 1991 in Taipei, Taiwan, is a multimedia artist working at the intersection of digital culture, identity, and contemporary image-making. Her practice spans photography, performance, and online media, often incorporating self-portraiture, social media aesthetics, and ephemeral body-based installations.
Yuyi rose to prominence with projects that placed temporary tattoos of Instagram icons or texts on her skin, exploring themes of virtual identity, validation, and the blurred lines between online and offline existence. Her imagery is playful, self-aware, and emotionally direct, engaging with contemporary anxieties around beauty, self-representation, and digital ephemerality.
Her work draws on fashion, design, and internet culture, but also reveals a vulnerable, diaristic dimension. By placing herself within her work — literally and conceptually — Yuyi transforms personal experience into shared visual language. She represents a generation shaped by screens, yet searching for authenticity in exposure.
Syoin Kajii
Syoin Kajii, born in 1976 in Japan, began his adult life as a Buddhist monk before turning to photography. This spiritual background continues to inform his work, which is marked by stillness, contemplation, and an acute sensitivity to natural forces. Kajii is best known for his Nami and Kawa series — photographic explorations of the sea and river systems of Japan, often in extreme weather conditions.
Using long exposures and minimal compositions, Kajii captures water in a way that transforms motion into structure and chaos into clarity. His seascapes are not picturesque but elemental — emphasizing rhythm, mass, and the sublime.
Kajii’s work resists narrative and foregrounds presence: the presence of time, of the environment, and of the viewer in a space of near-silence. Each image becomes a kind of visual koan — simple in appearance, profound in experience.
Rinko Kawauchi
Rinko Kawauchi, born in 1972 in Shiga, Japan, is one of the most celebrated figures in contemporary Japanese photography. Her work is characterized by a poetic, almost meditative approach to the everyday, revealing the extraordinary within the ordinary through a soft, luminous visual language. Using delicate color palettes, subtle framing, and a profound attentiveness to light, Kawauchi transforms brief, seemingly inconsequential moments into deeply evocative images.
Since her breakthrough photobook Utatane (2001), Kawauchi has continued to publish widely and exhibit internationally. Her thematic concerns include time, memory, nature, and the cycles of life. Projects such as Cui Cui, Illuminance, and Halo reflect her sustained engagement with both personal and universal experience.
Kawauchi’s images often function like visual haiku — fragments of perception charged with emotional resonance. Her photography offers a contemplative space for viewers, balancing fragility with fullness.
Jung Lee
Born in 1972 in Seoul, South Korea, Jung Lee is a visual artist whose work blends photography, text, and installation. She is best known for her ongoing series of neon light installations staged in natural or desolate environments, where emotionally charged phrases — such as “I still remember” or “The end” — glow against fog, snow, or dusk.
Lee’s background in literature informs her use of language as both image and meaning. By placing artificial light into otherwise untouched landscapes, she creates a tension between the permanence of human emotion and the transience of nature. Her photographs are carefully constructed yet retain an ephemeral, open-ended quality.
Her work is both conceptual and lyrical, drawing viewers into a psychological and poetic encounter with language, place, and absence. In these works, the personal becomes monumental, and solitude becomes luminous.
Lieko Shiga
Lieko Shiga, born in 1980 in Aichi, Japan, is known for her emotionally intense, often surreal photographic practice. Her work interweaves elements of performance, memory, mythology, and landscape. After moving to the coastal town of Kitakama in 2008, Shiga began a long-term collaboration with the local community — a process that profoundly shaped her work, especially following the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami.
Shiga’s images are highly atmospheric, rich in symbolism and visual layering. She often stages scenes using local residents, theatrical lighting, and altered perspectives. Her major project Rasen Kaigan (Spiral Shore) brought together personal trauma, collective memory, and a reimagining of photographic narrative.
Her practice resists categorization: documentary merges with fiction, the intimate with the archetypal. Shiga’s photographs invite viewers into a space where inner and outer worlds blur, and emotion becomes a landscape in its own right.
Emma Summerton
Emma Summerton, born in 1970 in Sydney, Australia, is a photographer known for her rich visual narratives that blend fashion, psychology, and symbolism. After studying fine art in Sydney, she began her career in London, quickly rising to prominence through editorials for Vogue, i-D, and W Magazine. Her distinctive style combines theatrical staging, saturated colors, and references to mythology, art history, and dream imagery.
Summerton’s celebrated Muses series, for instance, portrays women as archetypal figures — artist, magician, explorer — exploring identity through stylization and storytelling. Her work exists at the intersection of fashion and fine art, expanding both traditions through a deeply personal lens.
Balancing fantasy with concept, Summerton constructs visual worlds that are both seductive and self-aware. Her images engage the viewer not only through surface and style, but through layered meanings and symbolic depth.
Risaku Suzuki
Risaku Suzuki, born in 1963 in Wakayama, Japan, creates images that are deeply rooted in the experience of place, light, and time. His long-running series on cherry blossoms, sacred sites, and the Kumano region reflect an acute sensitivity to the rhythms of nature and the act of seeing itself. Originally trained in oil painting, Suzuki brings a painter’s sensibility to the photographic image — emphasizing texture, composition, and tone.
His photographs often approach the subject obliquely, avoiding iconic or central views in favor of subtle, immersive perspectives. In series such as Sakura, Kumano, and White, he investigates not only the landscape but the viewer’s relationship to it: how we see, remember, and inhabit visual space.
Suzuki’s work offers a slow, precise form of looking. His images don’t describe, but evoke — making room for nuance, repetition, and the quiet unfolding of perception.
Miroslav Tichý
Miroslav Tichý (1926–2011) was a Czech artist who developed a highly singular photographic practice outside the mainstream art world. After withdrawing from public life during the Communist regime, Tichý began photographing the women of his hometown, Kyjov, using handmade cameras constructed from cardboard, thread spools, and other discarded materials.
His photographs — often soft, scratched, or otherwise “imperfect” — are intimate studies of female figures in public and private settings: walking, bathing, resting. More than voyeuristic images, they are now seen as meditations on memory, time, and the act of looking itself. Tichý printed his images with equally rudimentary tools, often on found paper, further enhancing their tactile and fragile quality.
Though he remained virtually unknown for most of his life, Tichý’s work was rediscovered in the early 2000s and is now regarded as a profound contribution to outsider and conceptual photography. His images exist at the margins of visibility — not quite documentation, not quite dream — where imperfection becomes poetic.
Albert Watson
Born in 1942 in Edinburgh, Scotland, Albert Watson is one of the most iconic photographers of the past five decades. Working across portraiture, fashion, landscape, and still life, Watson is known for his masterful use of light and form, as well as his ability to extract psychological depth from his subjects.
Watson's portraits — from Alfred Hitchcock to Steve Jobs — are both striking and introspective, while his fashion photography for Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and Rolling Stone has set aesthetic benchmarks in the industry. Beyond editorial work, his personal projects include large-format landscapes, abstract studies, and deeply atmospheric travel series.
Equally at ease in the studio and in the field, Watson blends technical precision with a cinematic sense of drama. His work embodies a visual language that is bold, refined, and instantly recognizable.
