Kimiko Yoshida’s “Marry me!” Exhibition at Michali Fine Art Gallery in Miami Beach

By Emily Waldorf

My good friend from Paris, Maude Michali of Michali Fine Art, is presenting an exciting exhibition of large-scale color photographs from the mid-career artist Kimiko Yoshida as a permanent event at this year’s Art Basel Miami Beach, which will remain installed at the gallery through December 28, 2008.  Kimiko Yoshida, a Japanese photographer with impressive auction records, created a series of self-portraits over the past seven years in which she disguises herself as a bride in wildly contrasting cultural identities.

Think bold face paint, dazzing jewels, geisha makeup, Native American feather headdresses, African royalty, and frosty ice queens.  The images are beautifully composed in a classical manner, saturated in rich color, yet shocking in their intensity and the directness through which Yoshida confronts the viewer’s culturally constructed notions of feminine beauty in its most fetishized form:  the bride.

Ms. Michali wrote the text of the gorgeous catalogue that accompanies the exhibition, examining the creative process and artistic inspiration behind Yoshida’s work.  She writes:

“She (Yoshida) borrows the precept of Descartes “Larvatus Prodeo”
(`I come forward masked’), and she turns into an African, an
Indian, an Egyptian, a Russian, a Tibetan… Pointing to the
fact that we live the globalization of goods and images, she
exceeds the identity feeling by mixing cultures, religions,
rituals and references. She crossbreeds, she hybrids, she
metamorphoses.  Her approach is a search of the truth: what is true, is what
is real. In accordance with Rimbaud, to her the individual
is multiple : “I is another”. The identity does not exist, the
identifications only are tangible.”

MICHALI FINE ART GALLERY
407 Lincoln Road
Miami Beach, FL 33139
United States
ph: 305 531 0960
fax: 305 531 0710
alt: 561 596 4177
maude@michali.us

The gallery is located next to the Convention Center in the building with the clock at the top of Lincoln Road – Washington Avenue.