Emiko Kasahara at White Box - New York - Brief Article

Since the mid-'80s, Emiko Kasahara's art has focused on femininity and feminism. Her early works were circumspect: her best-known pieces enclosed a carved marble rose within a glass box on a tiled pedestal, or pictured a blossom in cool large-scale photographs. The effect was hygienic, seemingly passionless and oddly disturbing.

A few years ago at Deitch Projects she showed a trio of beds with drains set into them at various positions, a large "carpet" of synthetic hair and two bleach-filled marble urinals shaped like breasts. Her manner was still cool and reserved, but the point was harsher.

Setting, the more subdued of the two works in her recent show, features six monitors showing a total of 88 Japanese women making up their faces. They were filmed from slightly above, so the entire face is visible as they look into a mirror below the camera or, in some cases, a handheld compact. The view is cut off high on the chest, so no tools are seen until they're in hand. The women range in age from high-school girls to the elderly. They are seen in real time, without sound or fancy effects, so the presentation is rather dull. The scope of the project sets one to thinking about this private ritual and the implications of masks--both hiding the real self and constructing a face to meet some outside standard. It's hard to resist concluding that the women look better after they've done their faces. But "better" than what?

The show's title work, Pink, consists of nine large, square photographs of a centered, navel-like recess, the whole image an intense pink with glossy highlights, as if covered with gel. A gallery statement identified the repetitive image as something none of us is likely to have seen: a cervix. Kasahara persuaded 24 Japanese women to be examined and photographed by a gynecologist. The black-and-white photos were tinted. One thinks here of '70s feminists urging women to examine their genitals with mirrors to know their bodies, of Zoe Leonard's portraits of female genitals and of Mona Hatoum's video of her own digestive tract taken by a tiny camera threaded into her body.

Japan is a place where mixed nude bathing was common until Western hang-ups suppressed it, but it's also a place where young women giggle while covering their mouths with their hands and speak in unnaturally high voices. Pink, one remembers from the Grey Art Gallery's recent show of the cosmetic history of Japan, was introduced in the '60s as a new, modern makeup color for Asian faces; a handout by White Box's guest curator, Reiko Tomii, notes that "pink" is a Japanese euphemism for the sex industry. Kasahara covers a lot of ground without saying a word.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group