IBASHO is proud to present the work of Tokyo Rumando in IBASHO’s first exhibition of 2018.
Tokyo Rumando is the artist name of a young Tokyo photographer (1980) who has a background in modelling and turned the camera lens on herself. In meticulously crafted scenes, she stages herself as characters both existing and imagined. In her work Rumando is the photographer, the bystander, the performer, the theme as well as the director.
Rumando’s work reveals an intuitive drive for authenticity defying gender roles that the Japanese patriarchal society puts on its women. She plays with ‘the male gaze’ parallel to her Western predecessors such as Cindy Sherman, to produce her own vision of identity, sexuality and intimacy. In that respect she is part of ‘Girlie Photographers’, a phenomenon of the mid 1990s in which photography was discovered by women and advanced to a central medium of self-expression and means of establishing an identity.

IBASHO will exhibit works from several series Rumando has created.
In her series Rest 3000 Stay 5000 from 2012 entered the world of the love hotels.
In Orphée from 2014 Rumando is in a room, standing staring into a mirror. But this mirror is enchanted. It not only reflects reality, but also retrieves lost memories, indeed memories of Rumando herself. It opens up a path into a strange world. Anxiety and fear, dark desire and pleasure, decadence and madness, and then death and the void are revealed and magnified by this mirror. For Rumando this series, named after Jean Cocteau’s film Orphée, functions as a way to look back at herself objectively. Rumando’s Orphée was included in a major exhibition in Tate Modern London ‘Performing for the Camera’ in 2016. Also on exhibition at IBASHO is a collection of Polaroids from her latest series Peel Apart, that Rumando took of herself over the years.

Artists: Tokyo Rumando