Looks of the invisible: Flesh, ornament, Baroque and Zen in Kimiko Yoshida’s self-portraits

Abstract

Since 2001, the visual artist Kimiko Yoshida (Japan-France) has been producing self-portraits in which her identity disappears under elaborate costumes, body paint and ornaments. Her costumes reconstitute well-known paintings from the History of Euro- American Art and her skin, entirely covered in ink in a quotation of the traditional Japanese geisha make up, blends in with the background before which she poses. In this article, we will look at the artist’s trajectory, focusing on the way in which she herself transforms her flesh into a plastic, inorganic element, taking possession of the cliché into which the image of the Asian woman has been transformed by the Western gaze. We will also pay attention to the tendency of abstraction of the body and erasure of individuality present in her self-portraits according to principles of both Japanese and European spirituality. These reflections will be based on Ainlin Cheng’s theory of Ornamentalism (2018) as well as on the concept of meat proposed by Deleuze in The logic of sensation (1981).