I fled Japan because I was dead. I took refuge in France to escape the mourning. One day, when I was three. my mother threw me out of the house. I left clutching a box filled with my treasures. I went to a public park. The police found me there the next day. Since then, I've always felt nomadic, errant, fleeing. When I got to France I had to learn a language like a child who'd just been born.
With a new sense of things I acquired by switching cultures, and with the freedom offered by the French language and by the structures of French thought, I'm currently involved in taking photographs of 'Bachelor Brides', in which is unravelled... but the wrong way around… the dread of the terrified little girl discovering the ancestral bondage of arranged marriages and the humiliating fate of Japanese women. How can anyone forget that secret guarded by my mother, which I discovered when I was eight, and which made me so horrified? I suddenly discovered that my parents were married, a marriage which had been arranged by their respective families.
Today in a sequence of probably exorcistic figures, I embody a bride who is paradoxical, intangible and unwed, with identities which are simultaneously dramatic, fictional, paradoxical, and contradictory. In surpassing my experience as a fashion creator in Tokyo, I am creating all kinds of almost monochrome self-portraits so as to present the virtual wedding of the unwed bride, by turns widow, astronaut, Chinese, magna, Egyptian, and so on. - Kimiko Yoshida
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