| “Imagine yourself in a big white room, a beauty clinic if you like, where pure nature could be inserted in your body. Or where even body parts could be replaced by fresh life. Where beautiful women become even more beautiful. Here you find your true and eternal youth. Your instant rush on a new day….” |  |
Marcel van der Vlugt
“Imagine yourself in a big white room, a beauty clinic if you like, where pure nature could be inserted in your body. Or where even body parts could be replaced by fresh life. Where beautiful women become even more beautiful. Here you find your true and eternal youth. Your instant rush on a new day….”
This is the introduction I wrote in the book of the series A New Day. After I completed my last series I Like… I wanted to start a project of portraits of women who just had surgery—plastic, that is. Every magazine and TV station was proclaiming that you should have operation: make-up and makeover, over and over. The frenzy is crazy.
Somehow I am fascinated with people who are obsessed with this so-called ideal beauty. These creatures wrapped up in bandages fascinated me just as much as the French film character Fantomas and the war images in Life magazine of wounded soldiers from World War II by Ralph Morse. Don’t forget actress Juliette Mayniel in Eyes Without a Face—besides, I like watching ER late at night.
However, not one single woman wanted me to document their new beauty. No one wanted to share their new looks with me or reveal their bandages, so I decided to open up my own beauty clinic, right here in my studio, where I could play doctor, with nurses and patients. Wouldn’t it then be nice if these operations could be done with blossoming trees instead of Botox, silicone gel, or saltwater implants? Have you ever seen a group of Japanese people standing in front of a Sakura blossom tree in the center of Tokyo in springtime? How long will these flowers last?
Finally, let’s play with the expectations of the viewer, to combine the real with the fake. The breasts are real and the blossoms are fake—or is it the other way around? Next time I will travel to the towns of beauty, be it in the U.S. or in South Africa, and I will meet Mrs. Beauty. To explore beauty from all different perspectives is my mission: all of my work deals with beauty.
