Contemporary artist Mari Katayama\u2019s exhibition \u201cBroken Heart\u201d is showing at London\u2019s White Rainbow gallery until March 2nd. Somewhat a retrospective exhibition showcasing the artist\u2019s work to date, this first solo show in Europe featuressuch early representative works as \u201dI\u2019m wearing little high heels\u201d and \u201cI have child\u2019s feet\u201d (both 2011), as well as \u201ccannot turn the clock back\u201c (2017) and \u201cDolls\u201d (2018), an installation including a human-shaped doll with a mirror instead of a face. Concurrently with the exhibition opening, her book GIFT\u00a0<\/em>was published as well. On January 24, one day after the press preview, Katayama appeared in a talk session that the gallery and The Japan Foundation co-hosted at The Royal Society of Arts. Simon Baker, formerly a curator at Tate Modern, and since last year director of the Maison Europ\u00e9enne de la Photographie in Paris, contributed an essay to the aforementioned book, and now took the opportunity to ask Katayama some questions that would give the audience a better understanding of the way she composes her images.<\/p>\n The event started with a short speech in which Mana Takatori, Director General of The Japan Foundation London, praised Katayama\u2019s artistic work to date, stressing how the objects and self-portrait photographs that Katayama creates based on the unique sensitivity nurtured through her own physical experience are increasingly drawing the interest of curators around the world.<\/p>\n The word was then passed to Simon Baker, who encouraged Katayama to introduce her work in a presentation for which she had prepared several photographs.<\/p>\n Installation view (Left: I\u2019m wearing little high heel<\/i>, 2011,\u00a0 Right: I have child\u2019s feet<\/i>, 2011, Sculpture: Dolls and Boxes<\/i>, 2018) \u00a9\u008fMari Katayama, Courtesy of rin art association and White Rainbow, London, 2019\u00a0 <\/span>Photographed by\u00a0Damian Griffiths<\/p>\n Mari Katayama (born 1987) familiarized with needlework in her childhood, and has always liked to draw pictures. Suffering from congenital tibial hemimelia, she had both legs amputated at the age of nine. Katayama began to connect to other people by sharing photographs of objects and drawings she made, utilizing the social media that had just begun to spread at the time. Through these activities, she eventually became an accepted member of the Japanese art world. Having studied art history at a university in Gunma where she grew up, and photography at Tokyo University of the Arts, she began to create portrait photographs of herself with her own hand-sewn items and decorated artificial legs. Launched in 2011 was the \u201cHigh Heel Project\u201d for which the artist had high-heeled shoes made for her to stand on the stage in the manner of a singer or a model.<\/p>\n Simon Baker: \u201cI would like to ask you first about this photograph, \u2018I\u2019m wearing little high heels.\u2019 Did you have a general idea of what the work was going to look like before you started composing this scene?\u201d<\/p>\n Mari Katayama: \u201cI started off with sketches, based on which I made all kinds of objects. I arranged those objects, and finally dressed up and added myself to the scenery. All this happened in the six-mat room where I was living at the time, and I went back and forth between my position and the camera to check the composition a hundred times before releasing the shutter myself. The final result came out a bit different from my sketches.\u201d<\/p>\n SB: \u201cLet me ask you about your style of placing yourself within your works. Rather than calling them self-portraits, to me they seem more like performances in which you play a character of your own design.\u201d<\/p>\n MK: \u201cThis particular photograph does indeed have a story. It\u2019s about the way little children like to put on lipstick, slip into the high-heeled shoes in the entrance, and walk around in them imitating their admired mother\u2026 At the time, I was making money by singing songs at night. One day a customer complained that a woman who can\u2019t wear high heels wasn\u2019t a woman, so I thought I\u2019d give him high heels on artificial legs, and eventually started off with making such legs. That was when I realized that the Japanese welfare and healthcare system had been inhibiting people from doing such luxurious fashionable things as wearing high heels. For myself, high heels are at once a symbol for struggle and an image that expresses admiration. On the other hand, I don\u2019t really like to show the picture and give a long explanation like I\u2019m doing it right now. That\u2019s also because this was a photograph that I made for my graduation (from graduate school) in the first place.\u201d (laughs)<\/p>\n SB: \u201cSo your graduation work was quite a success, wasn\u2019t it!\u201d<\/p>\n MK: \u201cWell I somehow managed to graduate with it\u2026\u201d(laughs)<\/p>\n Installation view of the series cannot turn the clock back, 2017<\/i> \u00a9\u008fMari Katayama, Courtesy of rin art association and White Rainbow, London, 2019\u00a0 <\/span>Photographed by Damian Griffiths<\/p>\n Asked by Baker about her working method, Katayama explained how she established her own style by photographing her room in natural light, and releasing the shutter by herself. She also added that there were no particular photographers or artists that had a direct influence on her work. The images that she creates through trial and error represent Katayama herself and her personal living environment, and the results possess the creative ability to take the viewer away to a totally different kind of world. Katayama concluded that, through the presentation of herself, she wishes to reach down to the feelings of admiration that also exist in the depth of the viewer\u2019s mind.<\/p>\n Katayama then looked back on how she expanded the stage of her activity, and how this brought along changes in her working methods over the past few years. She illustrated this on the examples of the works \u201dshadow puppet\u201d and \u201cbystander\u201d (both 2016). In the former, she made her deformed left hand (the silhouette of which she usually draws when asked for her signature) the protagonist of a shadow play, added a narrative, and let that incarnation of her hand step out and walk into the world outside. The latter work Katayama originally made for the Setouchi Triennale. As she sensed certain physical limitations while commuting to the Setouchi region from her home in Gunma, she literally needed helpers to \u201cgive a hand,\u201d resulting in an object made of cloth printed with photographs of the hands of people on Naoshima, and photographs of Katayama \u201cwearing\u201d those hands like a dress in front of her collaborators and the Naoshima seascape.<\/p>\n MK: \u201cAs I was at home making that object and photographing myself in connection with it, the feeling of my own body connecting at once to those of other people was an experience that literally changed my world.\u201d<\/p>\n SB: \u201cDo you think there is some kind of meaning in the photos that contain additional exterior landscapes?\u201d<\/p>\n MK:\u201cI\u2019m not sure about the exact meaning yet, but as I went outside and turned my interest toward the world out there, it occurred to me that I might disappear and eventually stop making self-portraits one day.\u201d<\/p>\n Installation view \u00a9\u008fMari Katayama, Courtesy of rin art association and White Rainbow, London, 2019\u00a0 <\/span>Photographed by Damian Griffiths<\/p>\n The event closed with a Q&A session in which both Katayama and Baker answered some interesting questions from the audience.<\/p>\n Question to Mari Katayama: \u201cNow that you have opened your mind to the outside world, what kinds of works do you think you are going to make next?\u201d<\/p>\n MK: \u201cI have recently developed an interest in the people and the history of the area in Ota, Gunma Prefecture, where I currently live. There is a river that has been carrying mineral poison from the Ashio copper mine in the adjacent Tochigi Prefecture, and thereby polluting the fields in the area.<\/p>\n I felt like climbing a mountainand seeing how the people there have overcome that part of history, and how they live in the region today. The birth of my daughter is another aspect that will probably inspire me to take different photographs in the future.\u201d<\/p>\n Question to Simon Baker: \u201cWhy do you think Mari Katayama\u2019s works are so popular in the UK right now?\u201d<\/p>\n SB: \u201cI have just become a Frenchman so it\u2019s difficult for me to answer this question\u2026\u201c After the laughter in the audience had calmed down, he continued to explain his views. \u201cI first saw Mari Katayama\u2019s photos at the Unseen Amsterdam photo festival. I was there with some of my colleagues at Tate that are here with us today as well, and to me Mari\u2019s works looked just different from any other photographs that I had seen before. That\u2019s not because she is Japanese. It\u2019s on a completely different level. I think I felt that way because the photographic worlds she creates are so unique. And as we have all witnessed today, Mari\u2019s photographs have a rare kind of communicative ability. With the \u201cvoice\u201d of photography that she has made her own, I guess she will easily surmount the differences between Eastern and Western cultures.\u201d<\/p>\n Artist Talk at The Royal Society of Arts \u00a0Photo provided by White Rainbow<\/p>\n As the talk session ended here because time had run out, I\u2019d like to add some quotes from Simon Baker\u2019s essay on Mari Katayama in the book GIFT<\/em>. Baker describes the artist\u2019s subjectivity as \u201ca process of representation which is also a process of self-discovery, self-definition and self-construction,\u201d or in other words, \u201ca constant process of self-reconstruction.\u201dFurthermore, responding to an article on Katayama that The Guardian\u00a0<\/em>published in 2017, and in connection with such keywords as \u201cidentity\u201d and \u201cperformance,\u201d Baker mentions Katayama in the same breath with contemporary artists like Cindy Sherman or Jeff Wall, while leaving at once room for discussion about her unique and unprecedented style. Referring to the extremely private nature of the artist\u2019s practice surrounding herself with her own paintings and objects, and to the multilayered creation processes that ultimately result in photographic works, he points out that her materials \u201ctake on the kind of symbolic value that are usually associated (in the work of artists like Bourgeois or Kusama at least) with more abstract anamorphic forms.\u201d<\/p>\n For his cautious interpretation of the resulting artworks, Baker further quotes the dissident surrealist Georges Bataille, and a line from Andr\u00e9 Breton\u2019s attempt at self-portraiture in his piece\u00a0Nadja.<\/i>\u00a0As we learned also from Katayama\u2019s own presentation, creating works of art is for her synonymous with being alive. Baker accordingly calls her \u201can artist who is engaged in a long-term process of re-thinking physical paradigms, and who, indeed, lives this process on a daily basis,\u201d and suggests that Katayama \u201cfind meaning not in herself as such, but in the complex web of the things with which she surrounds herself.\u201d While the images produced this way sometimes come out different from what Katayama initially imagined, she continues to frame the sceneries she creates by variously “founding, co-opting, producing or reproducing,\u201d and eventually releasing the shutter by herself. The resulting \u201cabstract anamorphic forms\u201d represent not so much the artist herself, but they probably function more as a \u201cvoice\u201d for her to express herself.<\/p>\n Translated by Andreas Stuhlmann<\/p>\n Supported by rin art association<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Installation view (Left:\u00a0you\u2019re mine #001, 2014, Right:\u00a0Shell, 2016,\u00a0Sculpture:\u00a0Dolls, 2018) \u00a9\u008fMari Katayama, […]","protected":false},"author":58,"featured_media":3008,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[73,151],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/realtokyo.co.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3034"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/realtokyo.co.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/realtokyo.co.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/realtokyo.co.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/58"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/realtokyo.co.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3034"}],"version-history":[{"count":28,"href":"https:\/\/realtokyo.co.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3034\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3062,"href":"https:\/\/realtokyo.co.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3034\/revisions\/3062"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/realtokyo.co.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3008"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/realtokyo.co.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3034"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/realtokyo.co.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3034"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/realtokyo.co.jp\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3034"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/realtokyo.co.jp\/_sys2024\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/1_DSC0893-EditLR-1024x683.jpg\")
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