I Am Here

Saki Otsuka’s “I Am Here” is self-assertion, self-expression, self-emancipation.

Featuring works created in the past ten years, Saki Otsuka explores and utilizes her own body, her own image in a series of photo paintings—photographic self-portraits (both nude and non-nude) that the artist then painted over.

In some works the paint acts like an editing brush that hides or alters Otsuka’s original image, other times the paint seems to be a natural part of her world; image and self-image in an intricate interplay.

Published by Libro Arte in Japan, the book was designed by Paris-based design agency Bureau Kayser. “As a child, this reality felt hopeless to me. Am I a slave to the male gender for life?

Why don’t I have freedom? Why do women put up with such treatment? I came to feel despair at being born a woman. My nudity is an expression of frustration and anger.” ― from Saki Otsuka’s afterword (included in Japanese & English)