Junko Yamasaki

The Gallery Depardieu exhibits the Japanese artist Junko Yamasaki from 2005 June 3rd to 2005 July 28th. The artist, graduate of the Villa Arson (Ecole National Surpérieure d’Art), who lives and works in Nice France, has carried out a reflection on the link between nature and culture for many years. A crossover of Western and Japanese culture, she looks into the realms of animality, taboo, and sexuality. She invests gallery space exhibiting different works : installation of a thousand cranes (origami) hanging on the ceiling, hair clothes, and large format landscape photographs.

A fashion show-style performance is scheduled for June 3rd on the night of the opening party.

Junko Yamasaki aims to interrogate the animal part of man, a return to his instincts and to the satisfaction of his primal needs : eating, moving, excreting, reproducing... In this way the artist privileges the relation to nature and to our behaviour in light of her Japanese culture and European society. Her questioning on the return to animality is developed around symbolism of hair, following her works with plants carried out in Japan in 1993. Pubic hair was censored for a long-time in Japan, a derogatory symbol of Western society (Keto means : “hairy foreigner”) so that pubic hair was, for decades, censored and not visible in Japanese society. In her creative process, by appropriating hair symbolism, the artist hopes to go beyond the taboo of her society, to once again show hairs patiently planted on clothes (dresses, underwear, ties...) their locations matching those of the body. A necessary externalisation in order to go beyond the symbolic apprehension of the hair, a synonym of soul and eternity. Furthermore, the idea of protection is strongly presented in her work, protection of nature, our bodies, and our animal side. Just as the earth is covered with plants so are our bodies covered with hairs and clothes to protect us. The artist thus makes a critique on modern society, and its will to erase our animality, to propose the universal models of the hairless body, almost virtual icons.

By her installation of cranes, the artist pursues her reflection on the symbolism of these birds in Japanese tradition. The installation of a thousand cranes is an echo of the Japanese proverb : The crane lives a thousand years, the tortoise lives ten thousand years. The crane is the symbol of relative longevity, recovery and happiness. In Japan a thousand cranes folded, out of coloured paper are stringed together as in a rosary, and then offered to temples or to the sick to wish for quick recovery. Folding a thousand cranes one after another becomes an act of prayer or meditation. Junko Yamasaki proposes confronting our Western culture to other customs and other forms of spirituality.

In 1998, Junko Yamasaki turned towards photography to catch skies, distinct lights, and clouds in perpetual motion. “Duo”, photo-computer graphics work consists of assembling two views taken at different moments and spaces. We again find this duality between two cultures characteristic of the route of this artist who hopes to cross, to confront two space-times. As artist Stéphane Steiner wrote in 2004 “ Somewhere between homesickness and the joy of otherness, the familiar and the foreign... Hair, animality, sex are privileged materials used to shake up the values of our social codes.”