Through a series of self-portraits taken during the last seven
years, the Japanese photographer Kimiko Yoshida embodies
the brides of the world.
Rejecting the stereotypes of communautarism and
segregation, she challenges the search of narcissism :
she wants to erase the origins.
She borrows the precept of Descartes “Larvatus Prodeo”
(`I come forward masked’), and she turns into an African, an
Indian, an Egyptian, a Russian, a Tibetan… Pointing to the
fact that we live the globalization of goods and images, she
exceeds the identity feeling by mixing cultures, religions,
rituals and references. She crossbreeds, she hybrids, she
metamorphoses.
Her approach is a search of the truth: what is true, is what
is real. In accordance with Rimbaud, to her the individual
is multiple : “I is another”. The identity does not exist, the
identifications only are tangible.
Kimiko Yoshida changes and she wants to disappear into
some almost monochromic representations.
The face melts into the unit of color and the tribal object she
borrowed, a treasure from the past that is now preserved in a
museum, is revealed.
This technique evokes the Japanese tradition of the doran, a
white painting used by the geishas and the maïkos to erase
any characteristic of their face. On the contrary, in Occident,
the make-up is used to beautify, to call attention to oneself,
to hide the defects. The artist hopes to approach the concept
of the woman instead of the female ideal.
Everything is in the obliteration, the minimalism, the
detachment. Contrary to her contemporaries, she does not
look for appealing to pathos.
Changing mask infinitely, without geographical or temporal
consideration, she oscillates between figuration and
abstraction, showing the plurality of being as much aesthetic
as philosophical. I am not the one I show. I have to take the
risk to stand aside.
This purification which worries Kimiko Yoshida turns
meaningful when she entrusts “all that’s not me, that’s what
interest me”.
Maude Michali
