“Everyone’s curiosity is piqued by the refrigerator, which is in every house and indispensable to daily life.”
—Tokuko UshiodaFor her ongoing ICE BOX series, Tokuko Ushioda (b.1940) has been photographing refrigerators, shut and open, since 1981, starting with her own as seen in the current lot. In this deeply personal portrait, Ushioda showcases her refrigerator, the exterior and its contents, as this common household item takes on a life of its own, providing a portal to her family’s domestic landscape. Of the creation of this diptych and the origin of this project, she recalls:
One day, my husband (the photographer) Shinzo Shimao bought a refrigerator without any notice. Suddenly, the huge refrigerator was making loud noises in the middle of the night in our small, one-room apartment, which had no television, washing machine or a vacuum cleaner. At that time, I was struggling. I wanted to record our daily life with my camera but my life was consumed with caring for my daughter who was a toddler. So, I decided to start something that I can do in the house. While opening and closing the refrigerator and taking photographs of it, I became much more fascinated with its existence than with other things in the house. When I created this diptych, I somehow knew that it would become my life’s work.
After documenting her own refrigerator, Ushioda would go on to photograph her mother’s and those of her friends and relatives, resulting in the ICE BOX series. These diptychs together can be read as a visual survey of Tokyo’s residents and their evolving lifestyles through the decades.
The masterful diptych offered here was printed by Ushioda on photographic paper for aerial shots used for making maps. This expensive paper was bought by her husband Shinzo Shimao (b.1948) for his own work. Fascinated by the paper’s ‘elegant quality and richness of tones,’ Ushioda used leftover pieces to print this diptych, which she kept for herself, signifying the importance of this work to the artist. These two prints are the only early prints from the ICE BOX project known to exist. Aside from the Mead Art Musem at Amherst College, other later ICE BOX prints reside at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA and the Tokyo Photographic Art Musem.
T. Ushioda, ICE BOX, Tokyo: Beebooks, 1996. Provenance
Directly from the artist
Exhibited
Reinventing Tokyo: Japan's Largest City in the Artistic Imagination, Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, 25 August - 30 December 2012
A Bright Home, Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, 21 December - 1 March 2020
Ushioda Tokuko: Lifelong Learning, Yokohama Civic Art Gallery Azamino, 28 January - 26 February 2023Literature
T. Ushioda, ICE BOX, Tokyo: Beebooks, 1996, cover (closed), back cover (open), pp. 4-5
Reinventing Tokyo: Japan’s Largest City in the Artistic Imagination, Amherst: Mead Art Museum, 2012, p. 167
ULTIMATE
8
東京都世田谷区 Setagaya, Tokyo from 冷蔵庫／ICE BOX
1981
Gelatin silver print diptych.
Each Image: 20.2 x 20.2 cm (7 7/8 x 7 7/8 in.)
Each Sheet: 28.5 x 25 cm (11 1/4 x 9 7/8 in.) closed; 28 x 24.4 cm (11 x 9 5/8 in.) open
Each signed in Japanese/rōmaji in pencil on the verso.
This is a unique diptych, comprising the only early prints from the ICE BOX series known to exist. Featuring the artist’s own refrigerator, this is the work that launched her best-known project. Mead Art Museum at Amherst College in Massachusetts holds a later print of this diptych.
Estimate
£15,000 - 25,000 ‡
Sold for £25,400
Rachel Peart
Head of Department, London
RPeart@phillips.com
Yuka Yamaji
Head of Photographs, Europe
YYamaji@phillips.com
General Enquiries
+44 20 7318 4092
Photographs
London Auction 21 November 2023
14
This lot is no longer available.
