Who is Afraid of Kimiko?
By Max Lewicz
Subtle, fictional, paradoxical, Yoshida?s "Bachelor Brides" form an ensemble of quasi-monochromatic self-portraits, fragments of an intimate web, elaborating on a singular story: the feminine condition in Japan. Her images are large format, luminous squares, underlining her fantasy-bio epic. While still very young, Yoshida was struck by the story of her own mother, who met her husband for the first time on her wedding day. Yoshida Yoshida?s own story is compelling? born in Japan, she fled to France in 1995, where she adopted a new language, a new way to live, to create. She studied photography at the Ecole Nationale at Arles, later she went to Le Fresnoy-Studio at Tourcoing.
For two years now Yoshida has been concentrating on this series of "intangible self-portraits" which can be read as a quest for the hybridization of cultures, for the transformation of the being, and perhaps even as a 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. An allusion to Princess Bamboo, a famous Japanese legend recounting the saga of an impossible marriage, is visible. Discrete signs are endowed with an emotional charge: the veil, desire as expressed by the mouth, the folded-arm gesture implying resistance, the colors of autumn . She creates pieces to a private jigsaw puzzle, and a semiotics of colors: blue, a symbol of ice, but also of death and eternity; white, symbol of purity but also of banality and the quest for love; yellow, symbol of sun and light; red for passion, pain, blood and organic things.
Yoshida?s work has many references to the essay ?In Praise of Shadows? by Japanese writer Tanizaki Junichiro. Yoshida, in her photography, focuses on what Tanizaki would call the desire ?to give depth to the shadows,? as painting, ?here is nothing more than another delicate surface upon which the faint, frail light can play.? Yoshida never uses direct light, but always searches for that particular light which enters Japanese houses. Shot with a Hasselblad camera with a 120mm lens, her ?brides? inhabit a hybrid, multicultural world formed by layers of time and space.
The title of Yoshida?s show at Fifty One, "Who?s Afraid of Yoshida" refers to the work and speech of Barnett Newman (who drew his statement from the Albee play "Who Afraid of Virginia Wolf"). Barnett, a master of expansive spatial effects and richly evocative color, pioneered in making art that was both uncompromisingly abstract and powerfully emotive, and famously asked when published along with Rothko and Gottlieb in 1943, "Who is afraid of Red Yellow & Blue?""
