ARTIST BIO: Shingo YOSHIDA
Acclaimed filmmaker/photographer Shingo Yoshida (born 1974 in Tokyo, Japan. Lives and works in Marseille, France) defines his artistic practice as ‘Seeking the Hidden’. “I create works that focus on the daily life, culture, traditions, myths, and interactions with nature of people from various lands, as well as the powerlessness of humans. Life is ephemeral. What's important is how we live in the present, the process, and preserving those memories in my work. My creations evolve and grow with the times." Yoshida completed three post-graduate degrees at Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Art, Villa Arson, Nice, France (2005), Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, France (2005); and Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris, France (2007). Shingo Yoshida’s practice takes him to hidden places around the globe. With a gentle poetic sensibility, he seeks out forgotten or disappearing legends and myths hidden in remote parts of the world. His practice reflects a deep awareness of human fragility and insignificance in the face of nature. His work explores the intersections of landscape, memory, folklore and systems of knowledge, through film, photography, drawing, and site-specific interventions. Yoshida traces the remnants of disappearing landscapes, isolated cultures, and marginal mythologies, often journeying to remote regions that exist beyond the edges of the dominant narratives of the globalized world. His work is characterized by a quiet observational rigor and an ethnographic sensibility. Rather than documenting from a distance, Yoshida embeds himself in the rhythms and silences of the worlds he enters, forging intimate encounters with geographies often deemed peripheral or obsolete.
Selected recent major exhibitions include: New York Public Library, New York, USA (2024); La Société Étrange, Marseille, France (2024); Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg, Germany (2023); Gunma Museum of Art, Tatebayashi Japan (2023); Kanagawa Kenmin Hall, Yokohama, December 2022; The State Museum of Oriental Art, Moscow, Russia (2022); Tokyo Arts and Space Hongo, Tokyo, Japan (2021); Haus am Lutzowplatz, Berlin, Germany (2021); Berlinische Galerie, Museum for Modern Art - Berlin Video Art Festival, Berlin (2020); Yebisu International Festival, Loko Gallery, Tokyo, Japan (2020); MOMENTUM, Kunstquartier Bethanien, Berlin, Germany (2019); S.Y.P Art Space, Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan (209); Mikiko Sato, Hambourg, Germany (2018); Pavillon am Milchhof Berlin, Germany (2018); COP23 - UN Conference on Climate Change, Ministry of Environment Berlin & Bonn, Germany (2017); ikonoTV, global streaming (2017); Gunma Museum of Art, Tatebayashi, Gunma, Japan (2016); Tokyo Wonder Site, Kunstraum Kreuzberg, Berlin, Germany (2016); La Conciergerie Art Contemporain, Chambéry, France (2016); POLARIZED Vision!, Award Winner, Lapland, Rovaniemi, Finland (2015); Videoart at Midnight #67, Babylon Cinema, Berlin Germany (2015); Istanbul Modern Museum, Istanbul Turkey (2015); 60th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Germany (2014); Villa Arson, National Center for Contemporary Art, Nice, France (2013); Arte TV Creative, France-Germany (2013); 66th Festival de Cannes court métrage, Cannes, France (2012); MAC Museum of Contemporary Art, Santiago, Chile (2012); amongst many others.
Yoshida’s films and photographic works are held in many respected public collections, the New York Public Library (2023); Stiftung Hamburger Kunstsammlungen - Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg, Germany (2023); Gunma Museum of Art, Tatebayashi, Japan (2023); FRAC - French Public Collection, Provence, Alpes, Cote d’azur, France, (2022); MOMENTUM, Berlin, Germany (2020); Art Collection of the Ministry of Environment Germany, Berlin, Germany (2017); Berlinische Galerie, Museum for Modern Art, Berlin, Germany (2016); Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Germany (2016); Fluentum, Berlin, Germany (2016); Alliance Française, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (2006).
The end of day and the beginning of the world
2015
4K ProRes 422 HQ, colour, sound
22:00
Shingo Yoshida’s film The end of day and the beginning of the world (2015) is a lyrical documentation of an imperilled way of life, and a poetically literal form of time-travel. Flying through the Arctic to the North Pole, traversing stunningly beautiful arctic landscapes, Yoshida travelled to the 180° meridian - the International Date Line - that marks the man-made demarcation between two successive calendar days. With one foot in the icy landscape of yesterday and the other in tomorrow, Yoshida straddles the International Date Line to simultaneously inhabit both future and past. Collapsing temporal layers, The End of Day and the Beginning of the World is both elegy and prophecy. It beckons us to reconsider the landscapes we inherit—not as eternal backdrops, but as fragile intersections of memory, myth, and the unfolding legacy of ecological change.
The film opens with the roar of a small aircraft, abruptly shifting us into a stark, near-monochrome tundra. Yoshida’s contemplative lens lingers on intimate details: the rhythmic breath of reindeer fur, tents of local Chukchi people billowing over simmering fires, ice fissures traversing barren expanses, and moments of communal ritual. Shooting his film in the Russian Far East, specifically in the Siberian regions of Chukotka and Beringia, Yoshida was inspired by this uncanny zone where calendar days, national borders, and ecological cycles intersect. He shares with us the stark beauty of vast glaciers, and the ancient vanishing shamanistic beliefs of the indigenous peoples who live there in an unmediated contact with raw nature. As a mark of gratitude, and as a prayer of protection for his way home, he offers meat and bread as sacred offerings to both nature and the ravens of local folklore. Accompanying him through this poetic landscape, on what is as much a pilgrimage as a journey through space and time, we discover an inhospitable, hidden and threatened ecology, where time ebbs away, magic is still meaningful, and nature under threat. Remote Arctic panoramas once imagined as distant, static realms become urgent testimonies to climate shifts, human resilience, and cultural continuity.
Yoshida acts as a kind of cartographer—not of borders or nations, but of affective and ecological territories that resist mapping. His artistic inquiry follows trails that science might deem anecdotal, but which carry the weight of cultural survival and ecological reverence. He draws attention to the ways local knowledge, oral histories, and minor rituals encode entire cosmologies—systems of understanding that often vanish under the flattening force of modern progress. Yoshida’s film acts as a visual palimpsest: an accretion of ancestral myth and present reality, enclosed within a fragile climactic frontier that prefigures wider futures of environmental rupture.
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