Michel
Temman

Born in Paris in 1969, Michel Temman has been a writer, journalist and photographer for over thirty years. He has started photography at the age of 15 and three years later has joined the photo agency Emid in Paris with his first works published. After completion of his master’s degree at Sorbonne University, he began to publish his photo-reports (done in West Africa, South Africa, United States, Cambodia or Japan) and collaborated with Galatée Films. He moved to Japan in the 90’s as a freelance writer and photographer and joined in Tokyo the Keystone photo agency. He became the Tokyo correspondent of Libération (2002-2012) and published the essay The Japan of André Malraux (Picquier, 1995) and the biography Kitano by Kitano (Grasset, 2010), resulting of his five years of interviews with the Japanese actor and movie director Takeshi Kitano – the book was awarded the UFJ Prize for the best cinematographic biography in France in 2012. After moving to Shanghai, Michel Temman came back to his passion for abstract photography. His creative process has evolved previously while living in Kyoto, in 2011 and 2012, after the nuclear disaster of Fukushima that he covered for Libération - he wondered then how it can be possible to express deeper thoughts through only abstraction. He has started to use new techniques, his cameras and screens in experimental ways, both manual and technical, to give more scope to his artistic desires. His first appearance in an exhibition was in 1995, for an institutional project at the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo – he was that year a laureate of the Canon Foundation. More than twenty years later, he signed a major solo show at SuperChina Gallery in 2016 and has also exhibited new series in Xiamen (Gallery 28 at D-House). In 2018, he has collaborated with the Paris-based Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art during the exhibition A Beautiful Elsewhere at Power Station of Art Museum in Shanghai and was then invited to create an imaginary flag for the installation “Draw me a flag” – from an idea by artist Christian Boltanski. In 2019 and 2020, he joined group shows at Gallery Dumonteil Shanghai, Matthew Liu Fine Arts (Art Shenzhen 2020) and more recently during the exhibition Entropy at ArtCN Gallery Shanghai.