Tomoko Nagakawa
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Tomoko Nagakawa [b.1973, Japan] is a photographic artist whose practice bridges analogue photography with hand-applied printing techniques. Working through a slow, tactile process, she creates refined photographic objects that invite contemplation and open-ended interpretation. Her work foregrounds touch, material sensitivity, and the physical act of making as essential components of meaning.
Central to Nagakawa’s practice is a meditative method she refers to as “letter writing,” in which each work is approached as a quiet form of communication. Through the careful selection of surfaces, emulsions, and gestures, she constructs images that feel both intimate and expansive. Objects that carry a sense of presence, breath, and time.
Nagakawa’s work explores the unseen: unconscious emotion, the passage of time, and our sensory relationship to the invisible. Drawing on traditional photographic craftsmanship while engaging with conceptual inquiry, her practice seeks to reclaim ephemeral moments often overlooked. The resulting works encourage slowness and introspection, offering viewers a space for quiet connection where image, body, and mind intersect.
Tomoko Nagakawa’s new series ΔS ≥ 0 [The Weight of a Second] considers time not as a steady measurement, but as something lived, elastic and unstable. While clocks move forward evenly, experience does not. Moments stretch, collapse, repeat and disappear, leaving memory to fragment while certain images or sensations remain strangely intact. Drawing on ideas of entropy and irreversibility, the work explores how time accumulates weight rather than length, how repetition and erasure can suspend it, and how a single second can hold more meaning than years. Through blur, layering and acts of making and erasing, Nagakawa dwells in those dense points where time gathers instead of passing.
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Tomoko Nagakawa is represented in the UK by Open Doors Gallery
For all artwork enquiries
Contact | tom@opendoors.gallery
Follow @tomoko_nagakawa
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Tomoko Nagakawa: #86180, 2026
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Tomoko Nagakawa: #85860, 2026
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Tomoko Nagakawa: #86140, 2026
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Tomoko Nagakawa: #86070, 2026
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Tomoko Nagakawa: #86130, 2026
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Tomoko Nagakawa: #85980, 2026
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Tomoko Nagakawa: #85880, 2026
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Tomoko Nagakawa: #85970, 2026
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Tomoko Nagakawa: #86110, 2026
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