Kimiko Yoshida - KYOBAI, Japanese Art and Culture London Wednesday, April 2, 2008 | Phillips

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  • Provenance


    Fifty One Fine Art Photography, Antwerp

  • Catalogue Essay


    Subtle, fictional, paradoxical, Kimiko’s ‘Bachelor Brides’ form an ensemble of quasi-monochromatic self-portraits, fragments of an intimate web elaborating on one single story: that of Japan and the feminine condition. Her images are large formats, luminous squares, all the same size underlining the fantasy epic of this artist, who, very young, was struck by the story of her own mother, who met her husband for the first time on her wedding day. KimikoYoshida was born in Japan but fled to France in 1995, where she adopted a new language, a new way to live and create.This series of “intangible self-portraits” can be read as a quest for the hybridization of cultures and for the transformation of the being - or even as an deletion of the identities.The metamorphosis of her own identity into a multiplicity of identifications expresses the fading of uniqueness, the “deconstruction” of the self. Each of her images tells a tale, maybe that of Princess Bamboo, a famous Japanese legend recounting the saga of an impossible marriage. Or an emotionally charged situation whose theme is the inaccessible: the veil, desire as expressed by the mouth, the folded-arm gesture implying resistance, autumnal colour, all pieces of a private jigsaw puzzle.

PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE EUROPEAN COLLECTION

226

The Bride Blinded. Self-portrait

2003

Colour coupler print, Diasec mounted.

120 x 120 cm. (47 2/8 x 47 2/8 in).

Signed, titled, dated and annotated ‘HC’ in ink on an artist’s label affixed to the reverse of the acrylic flush-mount.

Estimate
£12,000 - 18,000 

Sold for £19,700

KYOBAI, Japanese Art and Culture

3 Apr 2008, 6pm
London