User:KazuteruCastelra/Ayano Sudo

from ja:須藤絢乃[]

Sudo Ayano須藤絢乃(Ayano Sudo, 1986 -) is a Japanese contemporary artist. Photographer. Bachelor's degree (art), Kyoto City University of Arts 2011  .

Profiles
Ayano Sudo (14th October 1986–) was a Japanese contemporary artist and photographer known for her disguised self- portraits, and photographic works of various kinds.

She graduated from Kyoto City University of Arts and Music with M.A. in 2011.

She was born in Osaka pref., Japan in 1986[1], and spent her middle and high school days in Ashiya city, Hyogo pref., Osaka’s neighboring city with population of more or less 100,000.

She graduated from Akashi Prefectural High School art class in 2005.

In 2009 she went to France to study painting and conceptual art in the exchange student program at Ecole des Beaux-Arts (School of Fine Arts), Paris.

After the study in France, she came back to Japan, and finished the conceptual design course to graduate from Kyoto City University of Art and Music with M.A. in 2011.

At present she lives in Tokyo.

She captures the desire for transformation and ideal images that transcend the gender of the subject in photographs, and presents flat works that appear to be between the color manuscripts of shojo manga (少女漫画) or girls’ comics ( Japanese comics) and photographs. One of the features of the work is that the actual work is printed on photographic paper with its own texture, decorated with rhinestones and glitter, etc., thus making her finished works uniquely glitter under lights.

While in Kyoto City Art University, she was awarded Yasumasa Morimura （森村泰昌, a Japanese appropriation artist）Award in MIO Photo Encouragement Award 2010 in Osaka, Japan.

Since then, she energetically presented her works overseas and held her first solo exhibition at 1839 Modern Art Gallery (1839當代藝廊) in Taipei, Taiwan in October of the same year.

2014, she received the Grand Prize of Canon New Cosmos of Photography Contest （写真新世紀Shashin Shinseiki; a photo contest sponsored by Canon Company, one of the two big photo contests in Japan open public for young  future photographers）for the series "幻想（Illusion） Gespenster" featuring herself dressed to missing girls who had really existed. A collection of works with the same title has been published by HOLOHOLO BOOKS in France.

As an artist she has energetically been working on exhibiting her works in various exhibitions and art fairs in Japan and overseas. Also, her varieties of photographic works have been appeared in books and magazines in Japanese and overseas markets as well.

Her works are stored in the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography, New York, USA and the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum (東京都写真美術館, Tokyo-to Shashin Bijutsukan ), Tokyo.

Major solo exhibitions include "Omokage (面影)-Autoscopy" (at Hillside Forum, Tokyo, 2015) and "Ayano Sudo Photo Exhibition Anima / Animus -featuring to introduce Kuniyoshi Kaneko's Room-" (at Ginza Mitsukoshi 7th Floor Gallery, Tokyo, 2018).

Major group exhibitions include " I know something about love; About Love Asian Contemporary" (at Tokyo Photographic Art Museum (TOP), 2018), "Photo City Exhibition" (21_21 DESIGN SIGHT, Tokyo City Photographic Exhibition held at TOP, Tokyo, Japan, 2018), "Internet of (No) Thing: Ubiquitous Networking and Artistic Intervention" (at Jogjakarta National Museum, 2018), "SELF / OTHERS", a dual photo exhibition,  (at Canon Gallery S, Tokyo, 2018), etc.

Her main works include "Metamorphose" (2011-), which depicts herself and her friends disguised as an ideal figure regardless of gender, and "Gespenster (幻影、illusion)", a self-portrait taken as a real missing girl. 2013-14), "Omokage(面影), Autoscopy" (2015) with the motif of such phenomenon as oneselves looking like totally different persons (2015), and among others.

Since 2020, Ayano Sudo has released the art magazine "The peppermint magazine (薄荷) ", which is created by collaborating with other artists in each issue.

Episodes behind the works

 * In an interview, Sudo told that she finds beauty in beings that sway in all boundaries born in society, such as gender, generation, and races, and also does she find beauty in danger that even life and death are sometimes vague, and Sudo shoots a series of works that do not exist in this world. She says that the feeling of strangeness that she feels in reality is regarded as an " uncanny valley " and she has a desire to overcome it.


 * One of Sudo's distinctive works is a work that uses a self-portrait technique. Sudo, who strongly believed that she had been a boy since the childhood, and got dressed like a boy. However, when he became a junior high school student, he began to wear Lolita fashion, which was popular among young girls at the time. One of the reasons for this was her strong desire that she wanted to be liked by the admirable ideal senior boy student she had met in her school.
 * “Illusion（幻影）/Gespenster”
 * "Illusion" (2013-2014) is a self-portrait book of photography created in her twenties from her experience to come across with a notice put on the wall of a railroad station about missing girls whose whereabout unknown for more than twenty years and that’s why and how she began to get dressed like the girls on the poster.    It consists of 21 self-portraits and a few snapshots. Sudo says that, with respect to the series of this work, she couldn't think of anything else but a self-portrait which could be realized by superimposing the emotions of herself over the emotion of the missing girls that those girls might have at that time.   The production process begins, at first, with making a list of missing girls   and doing in-depth research of every each of the girls’ profiles. Then, she searches for second-hand apparel shops to find similar clothes the girls in the poster wore at the time of missing, and then shoots in the place nearby her house.   When the print is completed, the finished printing paper further is sprinkled  with glitter like lame, and other glittering objects.   She feels an unspeakable sense of fear toward the girls who have gone to a mysterious world, and at the same time, another thought struck her. That is, they may now live in a land they don't know, or they may have become corpses somewhere they don't know. However, the girls on the list will be separated from the timeline of the world when they disappeared, will not grow old, and will remain intact for ever.    Sudo has a longing and strong consciousness for "being a girl" in her body and spirit, which is moving away from the girl every moment, and feels a certain kind of "sacredness" in them, and their existence again. With the above event in mind, she began trying to confirm the missing girls’ existence  once again and present it in front of people  .  In an interview with the New York Times, Sudo said the title of the photobook Gespenster, meaning illusion or ghost in German, was inspired by the novel "Sasameyuki." or “Makioka Sisters” written by Junichiro Tanizaki, a famous Japanese novelist.


 * “Teriha no Ibara/照葉野茨 ( a memorial rose)”

“Teriha no ibara” is a new series of her self-portrait photographic work, the motif of which came from “Makioka sisters” appearing in the novel “Sasame Yuki/細雪 (Light snow falls)”,  one of Junichiro Tanizaki’s masterpieces.

In the series of the work, photos of the house of Ashiya (an old house resided by Saika Tomita, a well-known Japanese poet)  and Tanizaki’s beloved furniture also are included. Also, she appears wearing her grand-mother’s Kimono and various accessories.

Sudo’s grand-mother was a traditional Japanese teahouse owner succeeding the business in 1945 from her father, a founder of the teahouse under the name of Ogawaya founded in 1910.

She reopened the teahouse together with her mother which was destroyed by an air bombing in the last war to become officially the owner of the teahouse in 1945, and opened a geisha house of Ogawaya at Shinmachi, Osaka.

Since 1950’s, the geisha house had been made use of by many Kansai celebrities for entertaining their guests, such as well-known Rakugo tellers like Beicho Ktasura and Kobeicho Katsura, famous comedians Kon Omura and Itoshi &Koishi Yumeji, and Kabuki players, such as Ganjiro Nakamura, Tojuro Sakata, etc.

This Geisha house now is deemed the last and only traditional house available in Semba and Shinmachi districts, Osaka.

Ayano Sudo has made her own experiences vitalized in creating her original artistic and photographic works, learning from the Tanaizaki’s novel “Makioka Sisters”, and getting motif from the women of modern time, i.e. the women of the time when Hanshin Modernism was born and grown in Osaka and Kobe areas in Taisho and early Showa Eras.

She has always been making which ever happens to her be the subjects for her own photography.