Seen: Please Connect With Me 繋がってください
Who: Mayuko Sato / website / instagram
Where: Kiyoyuki Kuwabara AG, Tokyo
When: July 1- 18, 2020 (open Wed - Sat. 15:00–21:00)
Saw a fascinating show- Mayuko Sato’s “Please Connect With Me” at Kiyoyuki Kuwabara AG.
Sato’s work incorporates self-portraiture by straight digital snapshots & iPhone selfies, screen grabs of Skype windows and photoshopped files of family snapshots with her estranged father deleted or manipulated in the image. The show is a brilliant mix of technique, honesty, poetry, truth, and confusion. It’s beautiful and a little funny and slightly frightening.
I’m always interested in seeing work that no one but the artist can do- and this is exactly that kind of experience. Anyone can go out and “shoot street”- and honestly, anymore a lot of it looks the same regardless who snapped it.
What I want to say is this- in this case, the only photographer who can truly deal with the private life and personal issues of a particular young woman is that particular young woman. There’s nothing here that anyone else could have done about her- and Photography is richer for this fact. This is NOT an aesthetic thing or anything about a visual “style”. There’s more to it.
Work like this shows how with a narrow, personal scope, a wider- maybe even universal- experience is revealed.
I’ve included her statement for the show in this post- it binds the images and kinda proves that point I just made.