Artist Statement
Since I fled my homeland to escape the mortifying servitude and humiliating fate of Japanese women, my art amplifies a feminist stance of protest against contemporary cliches of seduction, against voluntary servitude of women, against “identity”, appurtenances and “communities”, against the stereotypes of “gender” and the determinism of heredity. Art is above all the experience of transformation. Transformation is the ultimate value of the work. My Self-portraits, or what go by that name, are only the place and the formula of the mutation. The only raison d’être of art is to transform what art alone can transform. All that’s not me, that’s what interests me. To be there where I think I am not, to disappear where I think I am, that is what matters.
Process Statement
No color filter no computer. Direct shooting after painting my face (make-up) with the same color than the background. Conceptual protocole always the same since 2001: same subject (self-portrait), same light, same setting, same framing... Series and repetition: more it is the same more it changes.
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