Ayano Sudo was studying art in Paris as an exchange student in 2009 when she saw a German photographer’s recreations of “Harajuku style,” named for the teenage girls who doll themselves up as nurses, Lolitas and other characters, and congregate on Sundays near Harajuku railway station in Tokyo.
One of the most popular styles, kawaii (“cute”), emulates characters from Japanese anime cartoons and manga comics. “For me it was a fake, not Harajuku style or kawaii style,” Ms. Sudo said of these photographs. “As soon as I got back to Japan, I started to take self-portraits.” Referring to herself, she added, “She is a really usable model.”
Last year, Ms. Sudo, who is 28, published a book of photographs, “Gespenster,” in which she plays different roles. It won the New Cosmos of Photography Grand Prize in Japan, awarded annually by Canon. She knows that many viewers of her gender-bending photographs will be reminded of Cindy Sherman. In fact, her influences are closer to home. In Japanese theater, men play female roles in Kabuki, and in the century-old, Broadway-style Takarazuka Revue, women are cast as men. But the real action is happening on the street, with gyaruo boys (“gal boys”) teasing their highlighted hair, and “strong girls” modeling themselves on anime female superheroes.
“These people are mainstream, not so strange,” Ms. Sudo said. “If I had a son who wore makeup, it would be very nice for me.”
Recently, there have been high-profile journeys across the gender line, including Jeffrey Tambor’s Golden Globe-winning performance in the Amazon series “Transparent” as a father who comes out as transgender, and the stealth metamorphosis of Caitlyn Jenner onto the cover of Vanity Fair. At last year’s Whitney Biennial, Rhys Ernst and Zackary Drucker, Los Angeles-based artists and domestic partners, depicted in photographs their place-swapping surgical transformations.
The photographs of Ms. Sudo tell another story, not of permanent gender change but of playfully shifting and layered identities. “My mind is a boy,” she said. “I wanted to be a boy who wears a girl’s clothing.”
In New York in April at the AIPAD photography convention, she was demurely attired in a gingham frock. Her best friend in New York, Aaron Kolfage, 27, an artist in Williamsburg, was wearing nail polish and red eyeliner, and holding a kawaii toy bunny. Like Ms. Sudo, his hair is worn in bangs. They met on the Internet, admiring each other’s Tumblr photos.
“We’re both exploring how lines between nationality and gender are being bent and blurred, mainly through the Internet,” he said. “Ayano finds pieces of Japan everywhere she goes.”
She took the title of her book, which is the German word for ghost, from a mention in a classic Japanese novel, ”The Makioka Sisters.” In her mind, all boundaries can be crossed as easily as a mouse click.
The models in Ms. Sudo’s large color photographs — she has advanced to asking friends, including Mr. Kolfage, to pose in costume — assume the dreamlike appearances of teenagers in anime and manga. With Photoshop, eyes can become larger and skin paler. “We’re both into the retouching process,” Mr. Kolfage said. They are enthusiasts of purikura photo booths, where you adjust your background, change the size of your eyes, sprinkle the image with glitter and print it on stickers. Ms. Sudo applies glitter and rhinestones to some of her photographs.
She admires the work of Tomoko Sawada, a Japanese artist in her late 30s who photographs herself assuming different identities. But where Ms. Sawada, like Cindy Sherman, applies a feminist perspective, Ms. Sudo feels closer to Pierre et Gilles, a French couple who create and photograph lavish homoerotic tableaus. Her art is an escape, not a critique. “I love images of androgynes,” she said. “These images are my paradise.”
- http://bit.ly/1Gm3py4
Niciun comentariu:
Trimiteți un comentariu