Kimiko Yoshida
Kimiko Yoshida is a Japanese photographer born in Tokyo, 1963. She relocated to France in 1995 - after feeling oppressed in her home country due to her gender - where she learnt the language and created a new life. She studied photography at the Ecole Nationale at Arles and in 2005, she won the International Photography Award for her self portraits
Her work is very bright and colourful in order to catch the eye of her audience. Her portraiture work always begins in the same way, she covers herself – or her subjects in white paint (or another block colour) to create a blank canvas that she can add colourful paint and objects too. She then makes sure the setting, lighting and framing are all the same to keep her images cohesive. Her work is contemporary and abstract and tends to fit into the genre of fine art photography
‘There is no search for identity in my work. I know that identity doesn’t exist. There are only infinite layers of me. If I peel them back, like the skin of an onion, there will be nothing underneath’ – Kimiko Yoshida
Her series ‘Painting. Self-Portrait’ presents the ideas of transformation, the hybridisation of cultures as well as the deletion of identity itself. She names each of her images after famous artworks to challenge cultural identity and traditions in art.
I was drawn to her work because it was unlike anything else that I have come across so far. Her avant-garde style photographs shows her eccentric personality and this is something I would love to experiment with in my work as I want to send across a message about gender and culture in my project to link to my theme of what makes us who we are.
