KIMIKO YOSHIDA
She followed photography studies in Japan and in France where she lives and works since 1995.

Her studies:
Bachelor of Arts, Faculty of Literature, Chuo University, Tokyo, Japan (1986), Tokyo College of Photography, Japan (1995)

Her journey:
She hauls from her childhood experience her inspiration strength. She declares: “I fled from Japan, because I was dead. I took refuge in France to escape that mourning. One day, when I was three, my mother threw me out of the house. I left clutching a box filled with all my treasures. I went to a public park. The police found me there the next day. Since then, I’ve always felt nomadic, errant, fleeing. When I got to France I had to learn the language like a child who’d just been born”.
Her work is mostly based upon self-portraits. In a serial realized in 2003, “Marry me”, she represents herself as a bride. It reminds her of the games she used to play during her childhood, dreaming up wedding dresses for her dolls.

An esthetic of erasure

Kimiko Yoshida's self portraits sublimate a childhood marked by abandon and wandering. Her costumes are nourished by fantasies, memories, dreams and legends... Ghostly, travestied into a man or hermaphrodite, this Japanese artist endlessly questions identity, wholeness, universality. Her photographs, videos and installations let her face appear or disappear, disguised and made up. Subtle, fictional and paradoxical, she creates, according to the precepts of Taninzaki's celebrated essay, In Praise of Shadows, luminous evocations of her inner fantasies. Her desire to hybridize cultures and transform being bring her to multiple metamorphoses, in an invented universe, propitious to a systematic personal decontruction. "Everyone in the world tries to be unique, I want to be numerous, become universal."