Blue Period / Last Summer, Arakinema

Art

All photo by

Nobuyoshi Araki, courtesy of Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo

Prolific lensman Nobuyoshi Araki is a titan of Japanese photography. Araki’s immense oeuvre exploring corporeal subjects—bondage, his late wife Yoko, food, nudes—is readily recognized, yet few are familiar with his experimental film project Arakinema. First performed in 1986, the work features two ceiling-mounted projectors screening slideshows of the artist’s photographs along to an atmospheric soundtrack. In homage to this little-known work of Araki’s, New York’s Dashwood Books and Session Press will publish Blue Period / Last Summer, Arakinema, representing a comparative study on two series of images that comprise the piece. In 2005, the last year the work was staged live, Araki described its contrasting elements: “Last Summer is the future, it has a certain sense of resignation about it. Blue Period is the past, because it’s about how memory inhabits us. But we don’t yet have a memory of the future.” Office Magazine presents an exclusive look at Blue Period and Last Summer in anticipation of the upcoming book release.

Art

Joel Meyerowitz Orchestrates Harmony

Visual harmony is when everything lines up, colors dance together, shadows carve depth; it’s a fleeting moment in which everything sits perfect for a second. A phenomenon Meyerowitz was true in chasing; moments he describes as “nearly invisible” because of their transience. His hunt for harmony leads his lens to near and far. In the inertia of 1960s New York streets, these moments are much hard to come by but so alluring when witnessed, and Meyerowitz preserves it to be seen by all. Shifting his camera's gaze from the velocity and energy within NYC to a slower scenery in the 1970s. In the open horizons, undisturbed by honking horns and masses of animated characters, color and form become the main subjects.

Meyerowitz is driven by a Robert Frost quote from The Figure of a Poem: 'No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader. For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn't know I knew.' He spots the near invisible surprises in the habitual routines of life. During a time when color in photography was considered aesthetically limiting and technically inferior, reserved for advertisements and holiday cards, Meyerowitz showed how color invites a whole new layer of emotional and visual depth. Color is what the world knows, but when orchestrated so thoughtfully, it illustrates a world like ours but rich in dreaminess, vividity, and whimsy.

The exhibit will run June 5th-July 11th at 3-5 Swallow Street, London.

For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn’t know I knew.

Laundry, Provinetown, Massachusetts, 1977

Bay Sky, Provinetown, Massachusetts, 2004

Art

I Am Not a Serious Person— Poyen Chen’s Latest Zine

May 29, 2026

Artist Poyen Chen's latest work in collaboration with Dashwood Books, I Am Not a Serious Person, is a collection of images that play with the objects and illusions of reality. After his father’s cancer diagnosis, Chen’s understanding of reality began to shift.

“For the first time, I saw the parts of myself I once believed were strong become vulnerable. I started questioning what felt real, what could be trusted, and how easily certainty could disappear.”

The collection features distorted and embellished images of the human face and body, juxtaposed with grounded, realistic images that serve as a contrast. This tension mirrored Chen’s own experiences and coincided with another subject he wanted to explore in his work: AI-generated art. A particularly charged topic within the art community right now, Chen sought to deconstruct the notion that art created without emotion— art by generation— could never fully replace what is real.

I Am Not a Serious Person strives to be so much more than something easy to generate, or even merely experience. The collection is rooted in Chen’s attempts to capture distortion, failure, humor, emotion, and meaning within this generative reality.

Text by Bernice Nguyen

Art

Dividend Turns the Body Into Object and Infrastructure

Digitally carved from 3D scans, the hands and feet are modeled from the artist Yaz Exall's own body, while the lower form references an imprint taken from the artist’s childhood best friend, preserving even the impression of a thong. Exaggerated hemispherical breasts rendered in a cubist style further distort the figure, pointing toward cosmetic idealization and the increasing artificiality of bodily perfection. Through its title, Dividend positions femininity as something exchanged, consumed, altered, and assigned value tracing the uneasy intersection of intimacy, violence, labor, and desire.