The result is “OMIAI?,” a delightfully startling series in which Sawada, 26, appears as 30 different people, from a pigtailed, docile girl in a green kimono to a svelte, stylish modern woman in a black pantsuit. “Even though you are the same person, others’ opinion of you changes based solely on how you look, and I wanted to ask why,” she says. That question has become a signature theme of her work, and one deeply relevant to Japanese society, where appearance is paramount–and can be deceptive. Sawada’s ability to objectify herself, coupled with a deadpan sense of humor, have helped her to emerge as the country’s hottest young photographer. Last month she won the Kimura Ihei Memorial Photography Award, one of Japan’s top prizes. A major solo exhibition to celebrate this feat will open April 20 at the Konica Minolta Plaza gallery in Tokyo, and her first book is due out later this month.
She credits youthful insecurity with igniting her creative energy. A chubby girl, she had long felt unattractive and inferior to her thinner friends. She hit a turning point when she started masquerading as different women for an art-school assignment to make self-portraits. “I saw myself in disguise in the mirror and liked the way I looked,” she says. Sawada was hooked–and the self-portraitist with multiple personalities was born.
Over three months in 1998 and 1999, she went back 400 times to a photo booth outside a subway station in Kobe, where she lives, and took passport photos of herself dressed and made up as 400 different people. In the series “ID400,” a grim-faced Sawada stares defiantly back at the camera. “I may have been trying to prove that what’s on the surface doesn’t matter and what’s inside counts,” says Sawada. She also did a series in which she imitated girls known as kogyaru, who dress up in short skirts and platform shoes, with dark, cakey makeup and blond hair. “Everybody criticized them as a group for looking strange but ignored what each of them might be thinking under the surface,” she says.
As is often the case with young Japanese artists, “her reputation has grown more quickly overseas than domestically,” says Osaka art dealer Tomoka Aya. While her home country lacks a market and support for up-and-coming artists, she has been invited to numerous exhibitions in the United States and Europe. Last summer New York’s Zabriskie Gallery held a large-scale Sawada exhibition featuring her “ID400” and “OMIAI?” pieces. Next month she will be back in New York to pick up an Infinity Award in the young-photographer category from the International Center of Photography. And she has plenty more overseas exhibits in the works, including a one-woman show scheduled to open at Vienna’s prestigious MAK Gallery this October.
Still, her following at home is growing rapidly, especially among young women who identify with her subject matter. Though Sawada is bubbly and charming in person, none of the women in her self-portraits is conventionally attractive. “[Sawada] uses her own body as if it were a blank canvas to make a brilliant statement,” says Michiko Kasahara, a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo. “In this society, young women are treated as if their only reason for being is their youthful looks, and that fades very quickly.” Sawada hears from many women at exhibitions and through e-mail that her pictures remind them to be true to themselves.
Inevitably, she has been compared with well-known self-portraitists like Cindy Sherman and the Japanese artist Yasumasa Morimura, who merges his own face and body with famous Western images (like Manet’s “Olympia” and portraits of Marilyn Monroe). But what separates Sawada from those others is that she is always unmistakably present. “No matter whether she wears a long-sleeved kimono or flaunts a cleavage as a kogyaru, and no matter how carefully she decorates herself, what we see is nobody other than Sawada herself,” photographer and Kimura Ihei award juror Kyoichi Tsuzuki wrote in Asashicamera magazine.
Last year Sawada began teaching at her alma mater, Seian University of Art and Design in Shiga prefecture. She says the job has given her new perspective on how work shapes identity. She used to work in a supermarket and as a waitress, and people would ask her if she was a freeter, an unskilled part-time laborer. “Freeters are the bottom of the social hierarchy–probably except for artists,” Sawada says. “I get little respect as an artist, but my status goes up when I mention I’m also a lecturer at a college. It’s weird.” It struck her as so odd, in fact, that she embarked on her current series, “Costume,” to look at what people’s jobs, as symbolized by their uniforms, say about their place in society. So far she’s disguised herself as 10 different women, including a nun in a habit, a receptionist in a pink uniform, a policewoman and a coquettish, kimono-clad landlady of a classic inn. As long as she continues to share the results, she’s welcome to change her image as often as she likes.
