No More No Less (SIGNED)

Kensuke Koike
No More No Less (SIGNED)

Photographs: Kensuke Koike & Thomas Sauvin

Publisher: Jiazazhi Press

48 pages

Year: 2018

Comments: Softcover in slipcase, 20,7 x 15,1 cm, b&w photographs. First edition of 400. In good condition other than edgewear on the slipcase, traces of use on the covers (folding) and original broken binding, some pages are loose. Signed by Kensuke Koike, with inscribed "LIMITED EDITION BROKEN 1/1".

In 2015, French artist Thomas Sauvin acquired an album produced in the early 1980s by an unknown Shanghai University photography student. The album comprises original negatives, silver prints, manuscript comments from an anonymous professor, and shows the student’s diligence in mastering the rules applying to the conventional portrait. This volume was given a second life through the expert hands of Kensuke Koike, a Japanese artist based in Venice whose practice combines collage and found photography.

The series, “No More, No Less”, born from the encounter between Koike and Sauvin, includes new silver prints made from the album’s original negatives. These prints were then submitted to Koike’s sharp imagination, who, with a simple blade and adhesive tape, deconstructs and reinvents the images. However, these purely manual interventions all respect one single formal rule: nothing is removed, nothing is added, “No More, No Less”. In such a context that blends freedom and constraint, Koike and Sauvin meticulously explore the possibilities of an image only made up of itself.

– From Publisher's website