Kendo has always existed in that charged space where discipline tips into something almost spiritual. Built on ritual, repetition and combat, the Japanese martial art carries not just movement but philosophy — a whole architecture of respect, hierarchy and inner control. In Red Patience, London-based photographer and director Josie Hall takes that world as her subject, turning her debut exhibition into something that sits between documentary, dreamscape and devotional study. The show opened at Have A Butchers and runs from April 17 to May 1, 2026.
Hall’s route into the project began in Tokyo, where she travelled looking for a physical, mental and creative reset after years of commercial and print work. There, she became drawn to the tension she perceived in Japanese culture: a coexistence of calm and chaos, restraint and intensity, which she found echoed in kendo itself. In the original reporting, Hall describes the practice as something close to religion — not just a sport, but a training of mind and body tied to everyday life.
That framing matters, because Red Patience does not seem interested in presenting kendo as spectacle alone. The deeper attraction is the contradiction built into it: strict etiquette and explosive confrontation, formal hierarchy and intimate psychological pressure. Hall’s research also led her to The Book of Five Rings, the 17th-century martial text by Miyamoto Musashi, which became a conceptual anchor for the work. Its five states — Earth, Water, Fire, Wind and Void — offered her a way to think about movement, mindset and how to photograph a practice that is as much internal as external.
That effort to get beneath the surface seems to have shaped the process as much as the final images. Because kendo culture is described as protective of its values and traditions, Hall and her team had to earn trust over time before gaining meaningful access. They were able to observe practices and tournaments, but the project only moved forward by proving that it was approaching the form with seriousness rather than exotic curiosity. That patience feels central to the work’s tone. The exhibition does not read as someone dropping into a closed world for visual material; it reads as an attempt to meet that world on its own terms. This is an inference based on Hall’s description of the access process and her emphasis on respect and authenticity.
Visually, the project expands beyond still photography. Alongside large-scale prints produced by MAY, the exhibition includes a film Hall made with Mike Lamont, using her images as the basis for a moving work that rejects slick documentary realism in favour of something more tactile and surreal. According to the original article, the collaborators wanted the visual language to feel closer to ink or paint, while also weaving in video game aesthetics inspired by the mythology of samurai culture and the philosophical language of kendo. Sound design by Cheng Zhuang pushes the result even further into a strange in-between zone: part historical echo, part digital hallucination.
That crossover is what makes the project feel especially current. Kendo is not treated here as a fixed tradition sealed off from the present, but as a practice whose imagery continues to travel across mediums — through philosophy, contemporary photography, games, moving image and myth. Rather than diluting the form, that layered approach seems to underline how durable and adaptable its symbolism remains. This is an inference drawn from the exhibition’s mix of stills, film and game-inspired visual references described in the source.
There is also something refreshing about the show arriving as Hall’s debut exhibition, especially given that the article frames it as a step outside her more commercial work and toward a more personal visual language. Red Patience sounds less like a polished career pivot than the beginning of a deeper inquiry, one Hall has said she plans to continue by returning to Japan and exploring the more chaotic, subversive energy she senses beneath the surface of controlled society.
What Red Patience seems to understand is that kendo cannot be reduced to pure athletic image-making. Its force comes from everything around the strike: the silence, the etiquette, the waiting, the philosophy, the psychological charge. Hall’s exhibition appears to stay with that complexity, presenting kendo not just as combat but as a system of feeling. And that is probably why the work lingers — because it is not simply trying to show what kendo looks like, but to get closer to what it means. This last point is an interpretation based on the themes and process described in the reported exhibition coverage.