Kimiko Yoshida
© Kimiko Yoshida, The Red Akamba Bride with Kikuyu Earings, Kenya. Self-portrait, 2005
About Kimiko Yoshida
The Conceptual Protocol of my Self-portraits
by Kimiko Yoshida
My quasi-monochrome self-portraits - large, square, subtly lit monochromic photographs - constitute my signature works since 2001. The conceptual protocol behind my self-portraits is invariable: always the same minimalist etiquette, same setting, same subject, same lighting, same framing... Thus, the same face is repeatedly portrayed but is never identical to itself. The more the figure is repeated, the more different it becomes.
No digital editing, no Photoshop manipulations: make-up only and direct shooting.
Mutation, permutation, transmutation: it is all a matter of transformation. Art is a subtle process of transposition, an assiduous struggle with the state of things.
I see my self-portraits as timeless and abstract studies, that is to say, portraits detached from any anecdotal reference, from story telling, from narrative of any kind.
Art is a subtle process of transposition, an assiduous struggle with the state of things. The only raison d’être of art is to transform what art alone can transform. The question is not an insignificant “Who am I?” But my work does open on the more pertinent and essential question of identifications: “How many am I?” Which obviously has quite a different impact. Remember John Lennon (the very first words introducing to I Am the Walrus): “I am he as you are he as you are me...”
All that’s not me, that’s what interests me. To be there where I think I am not, to disappear where I think I am, that is what matters. It is in fact a variation after the comments by Jacques Lacan on Descartes (cogito ergo sum: I think, therefore I am). Jacques Lacan underlines that “I think where I am not, I am where I do not think”, that is to say the being and the thinking are divided, split, disclosed. My work is a reflection upon the division between representation and meaning, representation and disappearance, representation and absence, signifier and signified... I’ve turned my back on any “quest for identity” and what goes with it: appurtenances and “communities”, stereotypes of “gender” and determinism of heredity.
The self-portrait isn’t a reflection of oneself, but a reflection on the representation of oneself. The mental allusion to a painting of an old master introduces immaterial otherness into my own work. I am conscious that it is precisely these characteristics of otherness and alterity, of dissemblance and dissimilarity which constitute what is unique in a work of art. It is this alterity that alters the representation and aims towards the abstraction.