With Kimiko Yoshida, there is a mise en abyme of disappearance that even threatens the image itself. Indeed, his portrait, this intangible and precarious reflection, tends to dissolve into the monochrome background or to hide under the rare accessories (objects, masks or fabrics) that escort the figure. Kimiko Yoshida's photography aspires to abstraction, when the self-portrait genre, by definition, refuses it.

Speaking of his works, the artist evokes "failed monochromes", but whose "failure" or "imperfection" constitutes precisely the point defined by Roland Barthes in La Chambre claire , that is to say this point in the image which challenges the gaze and testifies to the presence of this figure which has already disappeared. Beyond any anecdote, beyond the illustration of the temporality of a story or a narration, Kimiko Yoshida's photographic self-portraits aim at timelessness, hieraticism, intangibility.

Among the first series of the artist is the one entitled Single Brides. Self-portraits². From the outset, with this series, the conceptual and formal protocol that defines the work of Kimiko Yoshida is put in place. This protocol, which also governs subsequent photographic series, is marked with the seal of minimalism: always the same subject – the artist is his own model –; the same framing – on the face or the bust from the front and centered –; the same format – square-shaped prints –; the same size – squares of 142, 120, 110 or 28 centimeters on a side, depending on the series –; the same color, almost monochrome, uniting the background and the naked or adorned figure (make-up, wig, clothing); the same indirect lighting – fixed neutral light from two 500 watt tungsten bulbs –; the same title specifying the series.

For example, with Single Brides. Self-portraits³, the title is always divided into three parts: in The Widowed Bride. self-portrait (which dates from 2001 and is the very first self-portrait in the series), the term “Bride” introduces fiction; the second term (here "widow", but it can also be the name of an ethnic group, a famous character or a painting) represents the interval between truth and falsehood: it is a starting truth, a reference, an allusion, but the "bride" is not really a "widow"; finally, the last term, “self-portrait”, the most essential according to the artist, establishes the only reality in the fundamentally fictional work of Kimiko Yoshida, while introducing the functions of transformation, otherness and hybridization. This figure who can be both "married", "single" and "widowed" is a constant pictorial paradox, where the artist's personal obsession with marriage intersects⁴ and her freedom to “put on” multiple identifications as easily as the costumes she puts on.

Kimiko Yoshida's photography, which falls neither within the tradition of reportage nor that of the avant-gardes, but which is so reminiscent of painting⁵, must be considered both in its symbolic representation, its intellectual allusions and its material support. Because it is certain that, as for most painters, the work of this artist is carried out mainly - which does not mean only -, before the shooting, in the conceptual process and the intellectual preparation of the painting. image that the photographic act concretizes and fixes. The reference to pictorial art established here is not insignificant since Paint. self-portrait⁶ is precisely the name that the artist gave to a new series started in 2007.

In addition to this title, which explicitly refers to the genre of painting, the printing technique of this series supports this parallel with the painting. Indeed, these photographs are not prints on paper, but prints by archival digital pigment printing on cotton canvas stretched on a frame. The photographic medium is therefore hybridized here with the canvas, originally reserved for painting.

The rendering of the work is upset. Whereas, in the previous series, the photograph is printed on a satin (chemical) photo paper laminated on a Plexiglas plate – whose brilliance allows various plays of reflections of light, decor or the viewer superimposing the image –, the canvases of Paint. self-portrait have a softer, more velvety, more matte finish, annihilating these reflective effects and the parallels with the mirror. Painting also marks, in 2009-2010, the artist's transition to digital (even if this has not changed the fact that Kimiko Yoshida never retouches her photographs).

The hybridization of techniques and media in this series also contaminates the distinction between genres that ordinarily marks the hierarchy in the fine arts. Indeed, the title of each self-portrait in this series refers to a masterpiece of art history: for example, Painting (Mme de Pompadour by François Boucher). self-portrait from 2010 (ill. 1) evokes an oil on canvas by the painter François Boucher, entitled The Marquise de Pompadour seated in the open air of 1758, kept at the Victoria & Albert Museum. It is not a copy, even less a pastiche that Kimiko Yoshida is trying to make, but a mental allusion to the painting she is quoting: here, the fullness of the white dress signed Paco Rabanne floating above her head and of the artist's shoulders could recall the vast and enveloping white silk toilet that spreads out in the painting around the favorite of Louis XV.

The field of fashion – more precisely haute couture – is therefore also mobilized by the series Painting, which first includes, from 2007 to 2010, 38 portraits of the artist using clothes and accessories from different designers, then enriched in 2010 with 82 self-portraits made with couture dresses borrowed from the Paco Rabanne Heritage.

In this series as for single brides, Kimiko Yoshida imposes the same minimalist protocol on herself: the background of the photograph is always a large monochrome field (in reality, a fabric stretched against the wall of the studio) in which the figure, made up and dressed in finery in similar colors , tends to merge to disappear. However, with Painting, Kimiko Yoshida gave a new direction to her aesthetic posture. This is no longer solely intended to convey the intangibility of Marie and the fragility of the figuration, but also proceeds from the practice of "diversion" according to the term chosen by the artist in reference to Guy Debord.

Indeed, the photographer works in this series to divert from their ancient meanings both the practice of photography itself and fashion and the masterpieces of the history of art, mainly pictorial. This is how she can become the time of a photograph, the model of Painting (Judith of Cranach the Elder). self-portrait from 2010 (ill. 2), taking up a characteristic (Jacques Lacan says a “unary trait”) and arbitrary trait of a personal memory of the artist concerning the oil on wood entitled Judith, painted by Lucas Cranach the Elder around 1530, and kept at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. By diverting Paco Rabanne's accessories and dresses (as here, where a metal skirt is improperly worn around the neck, and what seems to be a black horsehair accessory oddly placed on the side of the face), the artist's self-portrait becomes a mental allusion in which the black background of the photograph and that of the painting, the ample dark headdress of Kimiko Yoshida and the large feathered hat of the painted model, or even the heavy necklaces shared by the two portraits are hybridized.

With this new series, by combining within the same image different media (photography/canvas), disciplines (fashion / painting / photography), genres (self-portrait / portrait of a biblical figure) and space-time (France / Japan / Germany; XXI^e / XVI^e centuries), while mixing a memory of her own with the masterpiece of another artist, the Japanese photographer manages to create a new singular artistic syncretism, characterized among other things by the notions of transitory and impermanence, with a hint ofukiyō. This Japanese "floating world" highlights earthly pleasures and the delicate beauties of nature, while emphasizing the extreme fragility and transience of these pleasures which, like the figures in Kimiko Yoshida's self-portraits, are doomed to disappear.

1: The information presented in this article comes from writings published by the artist and from a series of interviews conducted with Kimiko Yoshida and her husband Jean-Michel Ribettes (who actively participates in the development of the work) between 2008 and 2012 as part of the writing of my thesis devoted to the photographer, entitled “Personal myths and plural myths in the work of Kimiko Yoshida – An aesthetic of the in-between – 1995-2012”.

2 Single Brides. Self-portraits, the first series of the artist known to the public, started in 2001 and still in progress, composed of Lambda prints on Kodak Endura satin paper, mounted on Dibond and under Diasec, 120 x 120 x 2,5 cm.

3: The publication of Brides is mainly divided into three books published by Kimiko Yoshida at Actes Sud: Marry Me!, 2003; All That's Not Me, 2007; where I am not, 2010.

4: In her texts as in our interviews, the photographer evoked at length the traumatic memory of her seven years, when she learned from her mother's own mouth of the forced marriage of her parents in Japan.

5: The expression "visual photography" could have been appropriate if this terminology had not already been used by Dominique Baqué in his works devoted to contemporary photography, in a sense so precise and oriented that it is almost impossible to dissociate it from his writings.

In 6: Paint. self-portrait, archival pigment prints on canvas, anti-UV matte varnish, 142 x 142 x 3,6 cm.

Artist's website: https://kimiko.fr/