SIGHTING: THREE JAPANESE ARTISTS
Part 1: Pink
Recent Works by Emiko Kasahara

Curated by Reiko Tomii

1 November – 1 December 2001

The exhibition series “Sighting: Three Japanese Artists” at White Box consists of two parts: Part 1: “Pink”, a solo presentation of Emiko Kasahara, followed by Part 2: “History Lessons”, featuring Naoyoshi Hikosaka and Yukinori Yanagi.

The series introduces recent works by these artists, who combine conceptualist strategies with distinct aesthetic styles, who share an intent gaze on sites, or issues that draw little attention in our everyday life.

The first part, “Pink”, is the full-scale New York premiere of two of Emiko Kasahara’s major works: Pink (1997), photographs of cervix, and Setting (1998), videotaping of women’s make-up processes.

At a glance, Kasahara’s concern appears ostensibly feminist. Still, she seeks for a more ambiguous yet ambitious terrain—she does not intend to condemn the institutions as such that bind women but to deconstruct them, by individualizing each site, be it the woman’s body or cosmetics. Thus, for her, collaboration with other women (many of them, indeed) becomes a critical mode of operation. Yet, paradoxically, multiplicity she creates announces anonymity and similarity, adding layers of meaning to her works.

Pink resulted from a collaboration of Kasahara with twenty-four women and a male gynecologist in Tokyo, Japan. She asked the women to receive a few gynecological examinations each from the cooperating doctor, who photographed their cervixes in black-and-white. (It is not as customary in Japan for women to have annual visits with gynecologists as in the US) Consisting of nine enlarged images, tinted pink, Pink constitutes an internal site, invisible to ordinary sight, where a convergence takes place between sex and life, sexuality and reproduction. In other words, Pink embodies the space of “in between.”

Cosmetics and beauty products have proven to be a fertile ground for Kasahara who endeavors to see something that eludes our conscious scrutiny in the everyday context. Among them, Setting is a videotaped compilation of eighty-eight women’s make-up routines, in which the artist complicates the relationship of private-public. While the cosmetic ritual helps the women to create their public faces, the act is inherently private—no one but themselves and their mirrors ordinarily witness it. The process that channels the private and the public is ultimately made very public, when presented on monitors installed in such places as bathrooms, store windows, and gallery spaces.

This exhibition is partially supported by:
The Peter Norton Family Foundation
The Japan Foundation
Alexandra Munroe

In-kind contribution by Digital Colors, Inc. + Suraj Hansraj

PRESS

Show: Pink
Publication: Art in America
Writer: Janet Koplos
Title: Emiko Kasahara at White Box
Date:

Since the mid-80s, Emiko Kasahara’s art has focused on femininity and feminism. Her early works are circumspect: her best-known pieces enclosed a carved marble rose within a glass box on a tiled pedestal, or pictured a blossom in cool large-scale photographs. The effect was hygienic, seemingly passionless and oddly disturbing.
A few years ago at Deitch projects she showed a trio of beds with drains set into them in various positions, a large “carpet” of synthetic hair and two bleach-filled marble urinals shaped like breasts. Her manner was still cool and reserved, but the point was harsher,
Setting, the more subdued of the two works in her recent show, features six monitors showing a total of 88 Japanese women making up their faces. They were filmed from slightly above, so the entire face is visible as they look into a mirror below the camera or, in some cases, a handheld compact. The view is cut off high on the chest, so no tools are seen until they’re in hand. The women range in age from high-school girls to the elderly. They are seen in real time, without sound or fancy effects, so the presentation is rather dull. The scope of the project sets one to thinking about this private ritual and the implication of masks—both hiding the real self and constructing a face to meet some outside standard. It’s hard to resist concluding that the women look better after they’ve done their faces. But “better” than what?

The show’s title work, Pink, consists of nine large, square photographs of a centered, navel-like recess, the whole image an intense pink with glossy highlights, as if covered with gel. A gallery statement identified the repetitive image as something none of us is likely to have seen: a cervix. Kasahara persuaded 24 Japanese women to be examined and photographed by a gynecologist. The black-and-white photos were tinted. One thinks here of 70s feminists urging women to examine their genitals with mirrors to know their bodies, of Zoe Leonard’s portraits of female genitals and of Mona Hatoum’s video of her own digestive tract taken by a tiny camera threaded into her body.
Japan is a place where mixed nude bathing was common until Western hang-ups suppressed it, but it’s also a place where young women giggle while covering their mouths with their hands and speak in unnaturally high voices. Pink, one remembers.

| BACK |