Mayumi Hosokura

Hosokura Mayumi’s work emerged where the intimate bodily sensibility of Japanese photography after the 1990s met the changes brought by photobooks, digital images, and exhibition space after the 2010s. Born in Kyoto, Hosokura studied at the College of Letters, Ritsumeikan University, and the Department of Photography at Nihon University College of Art. She has worked between Tokyo and Kyoto. shashasha and TSCA both describe her work through the idea of “tactile vision,” emphasizing photographs and videos that deal with shifting boundaries among bodies, sexuality, human beings and artificial objects, and organic and inorganic matter^*1. Since the 2010s, photographs have circulated across photobooks, screens, social media, and exhibitions. Hosokura likewise moves among the printed page, video, digital collage, and installation to construct how bodies appear. In an interview with Tsuka, she said that in the digital age photography cannot be limited to paper, and that it is necessary to think about how images are shown and what photography itself may be^*19. Published by MACK, Transparency is the new mystery brings together twenty-two images of nudes and crystals in soft, translucent black-and-white photographs^*3. In NEW SKIN, male bodies, sculpture, selfies, clippings from gay magazines, and earlier photographs are layered as digital collage. Photography moves from recording the body to reorganizing the positions from which bodies are seen^*6. Hosokura’s work treats the boundaries between body and matter, sex and looking, analog and digital media, and photobook and exhibition as conditions that shape the act of seeing.

Moving the Body Away from “Personal Information”

Naked bodies, portraits of young people, plants, minerals, suburban landscapes, neon, and artificial objects recur throughout Hosokura’s photographs. An Epoi interview describes her work as moving through portraits and nudes, plants, minerals, suburban landscapes, and neon signs through vivid filters of color^*4. These subjects move across the boundaries of portrait, still life, and landscape. They are placed side by side as skin receiving light, places stripped of names, and objects that hold time. Hosokura has said that she chose black and white for Transparency is the new mystery because she wanted to reduce the elements from KAZAN and concentrate on the figures and what they suggest^*15. She also stated that, while thinking about portraiture and sexuality, she did not want to use typologies^*15. When information such as face, name, occupation, gender, and place recedes, the brightness of skin, the curve of joints, the texture of hair, the color of the print, and the grain of the image come forward. Hosokura’s body images reduce the signs that explain a person. They foreground the distance, desire, and language through which the viewer begins to read the body.

Color Adjusts the Distance to the Body

Hosokura uses color to adjust the distance from which the body is seen. Crystal Love Starlight is introduced as a series that juxtaposes photographs of neon signs evoking entertainment districts in regional cities with male and female nudes transformed into neon-like primary colors^*13. Here, color moves away from the natural color of the subject. It draws the body and the city into the same field of desire, artificiality, and glare. In the Epoi interview, Hosokura said that she often prints nudes in cooler colors to keep them from appearing too raw^*4. Some colors draw the body closer; others hold the viewer slightly back. Through this adjustment, the nude appears as an image shaped by light, paper, data, print, and memory before it settles into the category of a body displayed for view. In the American Suburb X interview, Hosokura explained that she did not use color in Transparency is the new mystery because she wanted to concentrate on the figures and what they suggest^*14. Intensifying color, cooling it, or moving toward black and white each changes the distance from which the body is seen.

NEW SKIN and the Collage of Multiple Desires

NEW SKIN is the project in which Hosokura multiplies the positions from which the male body is seen. FNMNL describes the exhibition as consisting of a large digital collage made from male portraits, male sculpture, selfies of Korean men found online, and clippings from gay magazines, together with video and photographic works drifting through that collage^*5. MACK also notes that the work begins from a large digital collage using old gay magazines, sculpture, found selfies, and Hosokura’s own photographs, with only images of men selected as material^*6. In the Epoi interview, Hosokura said that she felt the limits of her own fetishism. That statement can be read as a concern with keeping desire for the male body from being confined to a single viewpoint^*4. A woman looking at men, men looking at men, a self looking at the body, the museum gaze directed toward sculpture, and the networked gaze directed toward selfies all enter the same image. The body shifts from an object possessed by one viewer into an image crossed by several forms of desire. Tokyo Weekender introduces NEW SKIN through selfies, filters, digital images, and Haraway’s theory as a work that considers the boundaries of the human body^*20.

Images as “Maps,” Walking, and Diving

After NEW SKIN, the sensation of moving through a large image becomes an increasingly explicit method in Hosokura’s work. In the statement for TSCA’s exhibition Walking and Diving, Hosokura writes that she combines images encountered in daily life to make a large image, which she provisionally calls a “map”^*10. This “map” moves away from the function of measuring the world. It is a field in which past photographs, accidental details, and cell-like fragments produced through compositing are discovered through movement across the screen. TSCA’s English text describes the video in NEW SKIN as a reenactment of a gaze walking through a “map” made from gay magazines, male sculpture, selfies found online, and Hosokura’s own photographs of men, discovering details within it^*24. In a large image, skin, flowers, sculpture, rough print textures, and digital slips form changing relations, and the viewer’s attention is repeatedly reorganized. Photography becomes a medium that accepts the fact that people can look at the same image without being drawn to the same detail or retaining the same memory.

Expanding Photography between the Photobook and the Exhibition

Hosokura’s work is sustained by both photobook culture and exhibition space. The publication of Transparency is the new mystery and NEW SKIN by MACK shows that her body images reached international readers through photobooks as well as through exhibitions in Japan^*3. Her exhibitions move from transferring photobook images onto the wall toward a method in which images travel through screens and space. In a Tsuka interview, Hosokura said that, in the digital age, photography cannot be limited to paper; one must consider how images are shown and what photography itself may be^*19. TOKION introduces CELL(s) at Sony Park Mini in Ginza as a solo exhibition featuring NEW SKIN #54, and describes the work as installed in a space where layers, pixels, cells, and the city overlap^*8. In TSCA’s Sen to Me, Sen to Te is described as a photogram with machine embroidery that connects a cameraless photographic technique with hand movement, line, embroidery, and the gaze^*9.

Transparency is the new mystery

Transparency is the new mystery is an important work that clearly presents Hosokura’s approach to the body and crystals in photobook form. MACK describes the book as consisting of twenty-two images of nudes and crystals, linking silhouettes of hands, curled bodies, and crystalline symmetry through soft, translucent black-and-white photographs^*3. In a FotoRoom interview, Hosokura named J. G. Ballard’s The Crystal World as a major source for the work and explained that she saw the image of humans, animals, and nature being covered by crystals as a metaphor for the photographic experience^*15. In the American Suburb X interview, she explained that KAZAN placed minerals on the side of eternity and young people on the side of time being lost, while Transparency is the new mystery narrowed that problem and treated crystallization as a metaphor for the chemical transformation of photography^*14. The material conditions at stake here are concrete processes: light forming an image on photosensitive material, and paper or prints holding traces of time. The body and the crystal link temporality and endurance, skin and crystalline structure, exposure and chemical change.

Crystal Love Starlight, CYALIUM, Jubilee

In Crystal Love Starlight and CYALIUM, color, neon, the city, commerce, and image circulation move to the foreground. shashasha introduces Crystal Love Starlight as a series that places together the illumination of shops that might exist in the entertainment districts of regional cities and male and female nudes transformed into neon-like primary colors^*13. In the Epoi interview, Hosokura positioned CYALIUM as a bridge between earlier works and NEW SKIN, describing it as a book of color works that includes early approaches to collage such as juxtaposition, verticality, and tearing^*4. TSCA lists the 2017 solo exhibition Jubilee among her major exhibitions, and the gallery’s artist page includes images from the series^*2. In these works, nudes, neon, plants, minerals, and fields of color are arranged as elements that adjust the distance from which the body is seen. Color changes the speed at which the viewer approaches the body, the distance from which the body is held, and the intensity with which desire is felt.

NEW SKIN

NEW SKIN is a project in which the body, the gaze, digital images, and the exhibition form are brought together. KYOTOGRAPHIE 2022 introduces NEW SKIN as part of “10/10 Celebrating Contemporary Japanese Women Photographers” and positions it as a work that uses still and moving images to ask questions of identity, gender, and sexuality^*7. MACK’s page for the book explains that the work begins from one large digital collage, which is then divided into twelve pieces^*6. By cutting one large image into pieces and making the whole impossible to grasp at once, the work presents photography as a sequence of absence, memory, and fragments. In the Epoi interview, Hosokura explained the rule that only eleven of the twelve works may be shown at once, and that an image held in memory may be the most photographic image precisely because it cannot be shared with others^*4. The project gathers images of male bodies while also crossing several positions from which those bodies are seen.

CELL(s), Sen to Me, Walking and Diving

In CELL(s), Sen to Me, and Walking and Diving, the large image, scrolling, gaze, and body that emerged in NEW SKIN develop in a more spatial direction. TOKION introduces CELL(s) as a project installing NEW SKIN #54 in an underground space in Ginza, and presents the significance of installing Hosokura’s work—concerned with the boundaries between body and sexuality, human beings and artificial objects, organic and inorganic matter—on site through photography and video^*8. TSCA’s Digitalis or First-Person Camera describes Hosokura’s digitalis as a video in which the camera slowly crosses a large collage composed of photographs accumulated in daily life^*24. In Sen to Me, Sen to Te is described as a photogram with machine embroidery that connects a cameraless photographic technique with hand movement, line, embroidery, and the gaze^*9. In Walking and Diving, Hosokura presents a method of calling a large digital image made through daily compositing a “map,” then walking and diving through it on the screen and bringing back parts of it^*10. In her recent work, photography is both the result of photographing a subject and an act of moving through images, rediscovering accidental details, and returning them to paper, cyanotype, video, or exhibition space.

Body Images after Onna-no-ko Shashin

In Japanese photography after the 1990s, the work of Nagashima Yurie, HIROMIX, and others made it possible to photograph the self, friends, lovers, family, and everyday life at close range as a language for women to depict their own bodies and lives. The label onna-no-ko shashin, or “girl photography,” also carried the risk of reducing women photographers’ work to youth, private life, and lightness. An interview with Nagashima Yurie by the Agency for Cultural Affairs’ Art Platform Japan records that discourse around this label involved prejudice, sexism, and misogyny, and that Nagashima later sought to rewrite that reception critically^*25. Aperture’s I’m So Happy You Are Here places Japanese women photographers within a reexamination of photographic history and identifies everyday life, critiques of women’s roles, formal experimentation, and expanded photographic formats as central concerns^*12. Hosokura touches this reappraisal while moving away from a focus on women’s self-images or private daily life. Her work turns toward the arrangement of gazes around the male body. Electra Magazine places Nomura Sakiko, Okabe Momo, and Hosokura Mayumi together as artists who question conventional depictions of the male body^*26. In Hosokura’s photographs, the body does not resolve into an image of the artist’s interiority or a sign of the sitter’s gender. Skin, color, borrowed images, selfies, sculpture, and exhibition space overlap, producing images in which the position of looking remains unsettled.

Multiplying the Position from Which the Male Body Is Seen

The comparison with Nomura Sakiko helps clarify Hosokura’s position. Electra Magazine argues that, while HIROMIX, Ninagawa Mika, and Nagashima Yurie increased the visibility of women photographers in Japan in the 1990s, Nomura centered the male nude and reversed the photographic convention in which men look at women^*26. In NEW SKIN, Hosokura disperses that reversal across old gay magazines, museum sculpture, online selfies, and male portraits she had made herself. TSCA’s Digitalis or First-Person Camera explains that Hosokura’s male nudes reverse the gendered norm of photography in which a man stands behind the camera and a woman stands before it. It also describes NEW SKIN as an homage to gay photographers and as a digital collage made from various gazes directed toward the male body^*24. In Tokyo Weekender, Hosokura said that images of men by Jack Pierson, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Gus Van Sant influenced her and taught her the pleasure of looking at the male body^*20. Her male nudes cannot be reduced to a simple reversal in which a woman photographs a man. The gaze of a woman photographer, references to gay photographers, selfies circulating online, and male sculpture from art history converge, and the male body appears as a site crossed by several ways of looking.

Bodies, Screens, and Exhibition Space

Overseas, Hosokura’s work has also been placed beside women artists working with sex, pleasure, desire, technology, and the body. The National Gallery of Australia’s The Body Electric introduced Hosokura together with Nan Goldin, Sophie Calle, Cindy Sherman, Collier Schorr, Okabe Momo, Francesca Woodman, and others in an exhibition on sex, pleasure, and desire by women artists^*27. The Walker Art Center version treated the screen as a place for reconsidering the body and identity, with gender and sexuality among its central concerns^*28. Seen in this setting, Hosokura’s digital collage and installation address how the gaze changes as it passes through books, screens, exhibition space, and networked images. American Suburb X’s review of NEW SKIN notes that the work opens questions of gender and technology while still depending in part on the classification of signs and gender^*23. The review helps show that NEW SKIN does not simply dissolve boundaries. It makes visible the classifications and desires that operate when bodies are seen through photography, print, digital images, and exhibition space.

Named Bodies and Anonymous Landscapes

Hosokura’s body images are concerned as much with what information is subtracted from the subject as with abstraction or collage. In an interview with Kanagawa Arts Press, Hosokura discussed photographing for Isobe Ryo’s Rupo Kawasaki. She explained that reportage photography often presents the subject with many signs—who the person is and what background they have—and that she moved instead toward subtracting “what makes that person that person” through the act of photographing^*11. This statement shows her interest in which information is retained, which information is removed, and what distance remains when a body or place is seen. Her mixing of private and public space in the early Mapping series, her removal of place and personal names in KAZAN, her pairing of bodies and crystals in Transparency is the new mystery, and her layering of multiple desires in NEW SKIN each slow the movement by which a body is quickly absorbed into gender, name, ownership, or explanation. Hosokura’s photographs ask under what conditions a body is read as a body, and under what conditions it appears as a matter of image, memory, desire, and medium. In this sense, her work can be placed within Japanese photography since the 2010s as a practice that shifts the nude and body image from the attributes of the sitter toward the position from which the body is seen.