Tokyo Rumando is the artist name of a young Tokyo photographer, born in 1980, who after a career in modelling turned the camera lens on herself. In carefully crafted scenes, she not only creates imagined characters but also delves into all the existing personas in herself. “I am the photographer, the bystander, the performer, the theme as well as the director. Making pictures has no meaning if I cannot present the whole of my world,” she says.
Tokyo Rumando’s work reveals an intuitive drive for authenticity defying gender roles that the Japanese patriarchal society puts on its women. She plays with “the male gaze” parallel to her Western predecessors such as Cindy Sherman, to produce her own vision of identity, sexuality and intimacy. In that respect, she is part of “Girlie Photographers”, a phenomenon of the mid 1990s in which photography was discovered by women and advanced to a central medium of self-expression and ways of establishing an identity.
Although she is a young artist, work from Rumando’s series Orphée was included in a major exhibition at the Tate Modern London entitled Performing for the Camera in 2016. In her series Rest 3000 Stay 5000 from 2012, Rumando emerged herself in the world of the love hotels. With this series for which she visited more than 20 love hotels in Tokyo, she gives the viewer a peek into this other, secretive world.
In Orphée, in 2014, Rumando transformed herself into 26 different characters standing to the side of a magical mirror. The mirror not only reflects reality, but also retrieves lost memories of Rumando herself. The repetition of the composition represents oppression to her and brings out themes of horror and madness. This composition doesn’t entail a confrontation between her and the “reflection” in the mirror, but she is watching the scenes from afar, like an outsider. For the Rumando, this series, named after Jean Cocteau’s film Orphée, functions as a way to look back at herself objectively: “I was shaping my inner self again, projecting it on a picture and once again reintroducing it inside. Rather than finding, I’d say I was receiving something.”
A selection of these series are currently exhibited at IBASHO, in Antwerp, with also a collection of Polaroids from her latest series Peel Apart, that Rumando took of herself over the years. “I was a high school student when I first got the polaroid camera,” she says. “It was a fun gadget to play with friends, as it could quickly capture the moment. I used to use the polaroid camera to do testing for myself portraits. Polaroids are like a documentation of reality for me, as I make works that interconnect the present, past, and future. When I look into their unique colours, I can see many beautiful colour particles that make me think of the universe – it gives me an unexplainable sense of exaltation.”
Tokyo Rumando, I’m only happy when I’m naked
25 January – 4 March, 2018
IBASHO Gallery
Tolstraat 67,
2000 Antwerp
Belgium
