Photography by Kimiko Yoshida

Photographer: Kimiko Yoshida

Kimiko Yoshida’s self portraits sublimate a childhood marked by abandon and wandering. Her costumes are nourished by fantasies, memories, dreams and legends… Ghostly, travestied into a man or hermaphrodite, this Japanese artist endlessly questions identity, wholeness, universality. Her photographs, videos and installations let her face appear or disappear, disguised and made up. Subtle, fictional and paradoxical, she creates, according to the precepts of Taninzaki’s celebrated essay, In Praise of Shadows, luminous evocations of her inner fantasies. Her desire to hybridize cultures and transform being bring her to multiple metamorphoses, in an invented universe, propitious to a systematic personal decontruction. “Everyone in the world tries to be unique, I want to be numerous, become universal.”