écho 119
Kazuo Kitai , China
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"Kazuo Kitai : I.RO.HA 1.2.3"
Iroha, 2023, Iroha, 2023, Kitai Kazuo, Courtesy Galerie Écho 119
Kazuo Kitai (born in 1944 in China) abandoned his photography studies at the College of Art at Nihon University at an early age. Documenting the ‘Resistance’, the title of his first collection published in 1965, he is best known for his photographs of the Japanese protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1980s, he turned his attention to the inhabitants of Osaka and Tokyo (Shinsekai Monogatari, Funabashi Monogatari), as well as rural Japan. He has won numerous awards, including the prestigious Kimura Ihei Award (in 1975).
In this new series, “I RO HA”, Kazuo Kitaï revisits his own photographic archives: faces, bodies in tension, marching crowds, fragments of resistance. Known for documenting the protest movements in Japan in the 1960s, he has now chosen to reactivate these images through a radical gesture.
By tearing up his original silver prints and then covering them with paint, Kitaï transforms photography into raw material. The documentary becomes abstraction, the image a medium for a hybrid form, between calligraphy and painting. This work marks a break in his practice: it is no longer a question of bearing witness, but of reinterpreting.
These black-and-white photographs feature helmeted men, workers, police officers, students, busy streets and suspended objects. The artist adds bright colours and traces the Japanese characters “I”, “RO” and “HA” – the first sounds of the syllabary, equivalent to the “ABC” in the Latin alphabet. A return to basics, reinforced by the presence of the numbers ‘1, 2, 3’, which are pronounced like a countdown before taking the plunge.
The exhibition is accompanied by a manifesto book, somewhere between memoir, pictorial gesture and renewal, published by Chose Commune.
Text by Chose Commune
Solo show of Kitai Kazuo
From March 28 to July 7, 2026
The gallery
The Echo 119 gallery and bookshop was founded in 2016 by Noëlle Colin, who divides her time between France and Japan.
Specialising mainly in photography, the gallery presents the work of established and emerging artists, with a particular interest in Japanese artists. Without ever straying from the dual culture that defines its identity and determines its approach, Echo 119 has enriched itself with new artistic sensibilities, all of which share a common concern for contemporary issues and a significant aesthetic quest that makes the images intellectually and visually powerful works of art. In the spirit of the Japanese photographic tradition, Echo119 also offers a wide selection of photography books, from the latest publications to rare editions. The gallery is run by Salomé d'Ornano and Kinuko Asano as artistic director.
Gallery artists
Nobuyoshi Araki, Grégoire Eloy, Chloé Jafé, Rinko Kawauchi, Sakiko Nomura, Eiji Ohashi, Tokyo Rumando, Chieko, Shiraishi, Elliott Verdier, Hitomi Watanabe, Laure Winants
