What exactly are these delicate forms clinging to the wall?

Eight diminutive buds in a family of sorts, exquisitely carved from fine-grained marble, now swelling, flowing, modestly tumescent. A contained tension, between stasis and movement, is embodied in Emiko Kasahara’s Untitled – (In)different 1994. The work is a catalogue of nicely balanced binaries: hard material, soft shapes; biomorphic, almost living entities that seem to emanate from the flat gallery wall; most crucially, what we see are nascent male and female elements, which mirror each other in two almost symmetrical rows. I say almost symmetrical, because minute differences between (and among) the ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ forms alert us to their shared physical characteristics — fascinated, we observe that some of the pale protuberances are more (or less) clitoral, vulval, penile. More (and less) than human.

To be precise, Kasahara based her sculptures on the appearances presented by embryonic human genitalia at the crucial point when life trembles on the cusp — the defining capacity for becoming either female or male (or both). This is the meaning of Kasahara’s carefully chosen title, Untitled – (In)different. None of her cohort of pert personae may be named as yet, since the gender of each cannot be clearly ascertained; rather, all are collected together in both difference and sameness, in the moment of undifferentiated potential that might be said to most poignantly describe the entire course of life itself. And while notes in the Gallery’s artist file specify the top row as ‘Girl’ and the lower as ‘Boy’ (terminology that came from the artist’s studio), even this distinction is playfully ambiguous, so summary as to be a mere convenience of identification betraying the actual imprecision of social gender assignment.¹

For Kasahara, and generally for women in Japan today, a great deal is at stake in this sly and sophisticated humour. Born into an ancient culture with elaborately articulated gender roles and social hierarchies, over more than two decades Kasahara has deployed a wide array of materials and artistic practices to explore the nuances of female body experience and feminine social stereotyping, from her own culturally-nuanced perspective.

When I look at Untitled – (In)different, I am immediately reminded of the pale hairless blossom skin of (say) Kitagawa Utamaro’s eighteenth-century erotic beauties, and of the depiction of apparently refined and docile Japanese women in nihonga painting. It is also reminiscent of the assertiveness of contemporary artists, like Yayoi Kusama, and of the extraordinary changes Japanese women have wrought in their social situation over recent decades, including delaying or avoiding marriage.²

Kasahara’s is purposeful and self-reflexive work, springing from personal bodily and social experience. As critic Stephanie Cheung acutely observed, subjectivity is ‘the very subject of her oeuvre’.³ That productive subjectivity is rich and complex: it encompasses Kasahara’s ironic embrace of the canonical high status material of marble for her impudent little zygotes, who can still only dream of becoming fully-formed nude sculptures; it knowingly draws on the interrogative moment of Euro-American Postmodernism in the early 1990s, when Kasahara was studying in New York — we see this in the word play of her title; and it mines the repertoire of post-1960s feminist gestures worldwide, often tongue-in-cheek, always strategically.

Emiko Kasahara’s terrain is, as art historian Reiko Tomii observes, both ‘ambiguous yet ambitious’.⁴ In working with this slippery territory, Kasahara simultaneously supplements and subverts approved forms of the Japanese ‘national body’. It is a project with implications for all countries and cultures.

Endnotes

1. Refer to QAGOMA Research Library artist file, 1996.
2. For a recent snapshot of women’s social status in Japan, see Tomoko Otake, ‘Japanese women strive to empower themselves’, Japan Times, 3 March 2013; and also Rachel Nuwer, ‘Here’s why nearly half of Japanese women under 24 aren’t interested in sex’, Smithsonian.com, 21 October 2013, both viewed 28 April 2014.
3. Stephanie Cheung, ‘Seeing self’, Asian Art News, vol.15, no.5, September–October 2005, p.83.
4. See Reiko Tomii, ‘Colour of women: Pink and other works by Emiko Kasahara’, Biennale of Sydney 2004: On Reason and Emotion [exhibition catalogue], Biennale of Sydney, Woolloomooloo, NSW, 2004, p.124.