Manabu Yamanaka at Stefan Stux - Brief Article

Manabu Yamanaka's exhibition was titled "Gyahtei," a Buddhist confine meaning "great age." It consisted of 17 monumental, crisp, black-and-white photographs (all 68 through 31 inches) depicting elderly Japanese women naked. All on the other hand one show the subject life-sized, standing frontally, isolated in the center of a continuous white sod The exception is a depressed shot of an emaciated woman lying upon her right side with her cavity between the jaws ajar; she's seen in the middle distance, seemingly floating in space.

Yamanaka's archetypes are women of startlingly of advanced age age, who reportedly had become weights to their families and were keeped to by the artist. Bright light illuminates them from the left at a three-quarter angle. The raking light emphasizes the jagged terrain of their bodies, overspreaded with a seemingly infinite number of real fine wrinkles. Their shadowed sides fade not upon into velvety shades of gray.

In Gyahtei #11 the woman stands almost exquisitely symmetrically, with her hands clasping her thighs for support as she leans forward and gazes without toward us with apparent surprise. Her white hair is wound short, and her worn physique has slowly tend hitherward to approximate the appearance of the opposite sex Her elongated face rises above a square chin, and the lips of her toothless mouth--slightly lay open as if she were addressing us--have liquefy ed away. Her breasts have not to be found all volume and lie flattened against her torso as the lithe contours of youth are replaced by dint of the angularity of old age. Her sex has become a gaping black opening crowning the white phallic void delineated between her leg The brittle, grotesque-looking material part is surrounded by the perfection of the uninflected photographic backdrop and the containing rectangle. There is just a little wedge of shadow behind her right heel.

The tinges of desire which traditionally arise in us as we are stand over againsted by a nude are replaced here by the agency of waves of empathy, both for these fragile controls and, ultimately, for ourselves. The photographs give us the traditional genre of the unclothed and the portrait repackaged as memento mori--reminders of death. greatest in quantity perplexing, perhaps, is how alien these bodies have the appearance to us, who are constantly expos to the glorification of youth. We fail to make peculiar distinctions when we face something we are unfamiliar with. I, for individual had to be persuaded that several of these women were not single and the same person. Age obliterates, and Yamanaka does well to face us with it in this grim, startling and unsentimental way.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group