Viviane Sassen ヴィヴィアン・サッセン

Through the support of the KYOTOGRAPHIE and MEP partnership, now in its fourth year, Viviane Sassen holds her first major solo exhibition in Japan, a retrospective spanning thirty years.
PHOSPHOR, Art & Fashion (1990-2023) is the first major retrospective exhibition devoted to Dutch artist Viviane Sassen. The retrospective retraces thirty years of Sassen's creative work through over 200 works drawn from different series, archives, previously unseen works, and video installations. The exhibition explores Sassen's complex relationship with images that oscillate between quiet contemplation and visual exuberance, between surfaces and interiors, highlighting the inherent ambiguity of representation.
After studying fashion design, Viviane Sassen (b. 1972, lives and works in Amsterdam) studied photography at the Hogeschool voor de Kunsten (HKU) in Utrecht, Netherlands. Graduating in 1992, Sassen then devoted herself fully to photography, both as an artist and as a fashion photographer. From this dual trajectory she has developed a singular and eclectic visual oeuvre, distinguished by the unique use of colour, movement, framing, and approach to subjects.
Much like a research project, Viviane Sassen's work delves into her own obsessions, following a highly coherent conceptual practice. Death, sexuality, desire, and connection to others are all motifs that structure a body of work that combines photography with video, painting, and collage. Equally inspired by her personal history as a child growing up in Africa, along with literature, and the history of art—in particular the surrealist movement, with which the artist shares a taste for play, ambiguity, and mystery—Sassen's work has many different facets, which this exhibition hopes to reveal.