“To be there where I think I am not, to disappear where I think I am, that is what matters.”

Like her fellow Japanese self-costuming photographic artists Yasumasa Morimura and Tomoko Sawada,  Kimiko Yoshida’s work shows that art is about transformation and photography, in particular, is a medium of performance. Because her bodily decoration and physiognomy are so motley and elastic she would be beyond recognition in her hundreds of self-portraits, were it not for their uniformly square, front-angle head-and-shoulders format. But then, ‘self-portrait’ isn’t really the right term; these are not images of herself but of costumes; fantasy selves have swallowed her up completely. [read more]