Tokyo Gendai: New show features women artists as they continue to fight for the spotlight in Japan

By Emiko Jozuka and Junko Fukutome, CNN

Tokyo, Japan (CNN) — A woman with spiky, dyed blonde hair sits submerged in a bath strewn with red rose petals. She is naked, aside from a pair of swimming goggles just visible above the water line.

This is one of Japanese photographer Yurie Nagashima’s arresting self-portraits — and a parody of the “hair nude” photographs that swept Japan’s art scene in the 1990s.

Pubic hair was typically blurred in print media at the time, but the images began skirting censorship by presenting full-frontal nudes of Japanese actresses and celebrities as works of art. Nagashima, however, thought the phenomenon sexualized women by placing them in “unnatural poses” and making them look like “soft porn models.”

Her own ‘90s takes were a sarcastic and irreverent response, intended to hit back at a genre dominated by male photographers. In one shot, a topless Nagashima peers defiantly at the camera while straddling an exercise bike; in another, she seems to mockingly stare at the viewer, wearing transparent pink tights and a matching wig as she lies across a leopard print throw.

In an attempt to separate her images from the overtly objectified content of the genre, she even shot nude portraits together with her mother, brother and father.

But back then, Nagashima said, many missed the point.

“Even though I was parodying ‘hair nude’ photographs, because the critics were all men, they didn’t understand feminism and couldn’t see the difference,” the photographer said in a Zoom interview.

Last weekend, a selection of Nagashima’s self-portraits went on show at Tokyo Gendai, a major new art fair that welcomed more than 20,000 visitors to the Pacifico Yokohama convention center.

She was one of five artists featured in “Life Actually: The Work of Contemporary Japanese Women Artists,” an exhibition examining women’s distinct perspectives — including gender and other topics. Elsewhere, photographer Tomoko Yoneda’s meditative works explored the theme of collective memory, while Ayako Yamamoto’s images captured the memories and experiences of young women she had met overseas.

Female photographers in Japan have long struggled to gain economic and reputational parity with their male counterparts. But a shift took place in the 1970s, according to the show’s co-curator Michiko Kasahara, who is also the deputy director of Tokyo’s Artizon Museum.

“Artists began questioning the conventional way of depicting women through the eyes of men,” Kasahara said, pointing to the use of self-portraits that became popular during that decade as a way to wrestle back power.

Finding a voice

Nagashima emerged onto the art scene in the 1990s, some 20 years later. Recognizing that women creators weren’t immune to power imbalances with subjects themselves — “even if you question the images of women that men are portraying,” she said, “you might do the same thing if you use them as your own models” — she too saw self-portraits as a way of authentically expressing themes such as body image, sexuality and the female experience.

Nagashima documented the evolution of her identity — charting her experiences as a young student traveling Europe, becoming a mother and as a working photographer.

She also turned the lens on her friends, capturing seemingly banal moments close-up, like when they retouched their lipstick or took a drag from a cigarette.

Nagashima said she became more vocal about labeling her work as “feminist” after having a child. She was struck, she said, by the patriarchal structure of Japanese society and found herself in a double bind, caught between the expectations of being the perfect mother while also becoming an even better photographer.

The predicament prompted her to pursue a master’s degree in sociology at Tokyo’s Musashi University in 2015. Her thesis later became the basis of her first critical book, which explored the discourse surrounding women’s photography. It was, Nagashima said, her way of deconstructing the “onnanoko shashin” (or “girly photography”) movement that male critics categorized her works as being part of.

The reductive term was used by certain male critics in the 1990s to describe a group of women photographers who used lightweight (and therefore more accessible) cameras to capture themselves, their friends and their daily lives.

Nagashima’s book was a way of fighting back against the misinterpretation of her photography by — once again — men.

“I wanted to deconstruct ‘girly photography’ and reveal how it had been a different movement all along,” said Nagashima.

“I wanted to show that the nudes we took had been influenced by the third wave of feminism. I wanted to highlight that the male critics had misunderstood what we were trying to do at the time. I wanted to show what I had actually been doing.”

Creating more opportunities

While Kasahara argues that the country’s women artists are now more conscious of their self-worth than ever, and their number has increased, Japan’s art market is still stacked against them, with fewer opportunities to showcase their work or further their careers than their male counterparts.

Such challenges mirror gender inequality in the country at large. Japan ranks bottom among all G7 nations — and 116th out of 146 countries — in the World Economic Forum’s latest Global Gender Gap Index.

“Art museums and galleries must both consciously increase the number of women artists shown,” Kasahara said, adding that creating spaces for female expression could help shake “the image that Japan unfortunately projects as a country that discriminates against women.”

For Kasahara’s co-curator Yuri Yamada, it is equally important to revisit contemporary art history and excavate the overlooked contributions to the photographic canon.

“The history of photography in Japan has been around since the Edo period (1603 to 1868), but the history of women photographers is still very short,” said Yamada, who is also a curator at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum.

“We also need to go back and rediscover women photographers who had been around in the past and have been forgotten ever since.”

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