Mari Katayama

Mari Katayama (片山 真理, Katayama Mari) is a Japanese multimedia artist known for her sculpture and photography work.[2] Her work focuses on themes such as body image, identity, and her experience as an amputee.[2]

Mari Katayama
片山真理
Born1987 (age 32–33)
Saitama
NationalityJapanese
Alma materTokyo University of the Arts[1]
Known forSculpture, body art, photography
Home townOta, Gunma, Gunma Prefecture, Japan
Websitehttp://shell-kashime.com/

Early life

Katayama was born in Saitama Prefecture, Japan. She later moved to Gunma Prefecture, where she grew up. She was born with tibial hemimelia, which caused her to have club feet and a cleft left hand.[2] As a result, she learned to sew at an early age to make clothes that accomodated her leg braces. At the age of 9, she opted to have her legs amputated and learned to walk with prosthetic legs.[2]

Career

Katayama began styling photographs of herself with her sculptures and posting them online in high school. She was inspired to begin drawing on her prosthetics after modeling in a show for fashion designer Tatsuya Shimada, who discovered her through her blog.[2] Shimada said that he was looking for a unique model, and he saw Katayama as a "real girl who loves fashion" and thought there was potential for drawing on her prosthetics.[1] Katayama ended up lengthening her prosthetics for the show, bringing her total height to 180 cm (5 ft 11 in).[1] Later, she would create high heels for her prosthetics as well.[3]

Katayama also studied at the Tokyo University of the Arts, where she was mentored by the late Japanese curator Takashi Azumaya. With Azumaya's encouragement, she began to work as an artist.[1] She graduated with a master's degree in 2012.[4]

Her first solo exhibition was titled "you're mine" and was shown at the Traumaris gallery in Ebisu in 2014.[5] The collection of self portraits was inspired by studying her own body and her experience being an amputee.

In 2016, photographs from her exhibition "you're mine" were featured in "Roppongi Crossing 2016: My Body, Your Voice" (僕の身体、あなたの声, Boku no shintai, anata no koe) at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo.[1][6] Her portrait for the exhibition, the theme of which was the human body and gender, featured her in lingerie without her prosthetics.[6]

A retrospective of her work, titled 19872017, was shown at Gateau Festa Harada, a candy factory and gallery, in 2017.[2] Her show "On the Way Home", which consisted of all new work, also took place in 2017 at the Museum of Modern Art, Gunma.

From 2019-2020, Katayama displayed her photography at the University of Michigan Museum of Art as part of the Penny Stamps Speaker Series, in a show titled "My Body as Material".[7] Her photographs for the show captured her in indoor and outdoor environments to "explore her identity by objectifying her body in her art".[7]

Katayama's work was shown at the 58th Venice Biennale, an international art exhibition in Venice, Italy.[8][9]

Reception

Katayama's work has been positively received by critics and galleries. A review on Artsy commended her use of traditional crafts and "girlish" imagery, and Simon Baker of the Tate Modern praised her use of "ideas about identity and performance" without being derivative.[8][2][10]

Personal life

Katayama has one child, born in 2017.[11]

References
  1. "義足のアーティスト・片山真理の運命を変えた３人の男【前編】". www.afpbb.com (in Japanese). AFP BB News.
  2. "Punk prosthetics: The mesmerising art of living sculpture Mari Katayama". the Guardian. 6 March 2017.
  3. Ogura, Junko (3 March 2020). "Sewn limbs and surreal backdrops in the art of Mari Katayama". CNN. CNN. Retrieved 14 August 2020.
  4. "Mari Katayama - shell-kashime.com". shell-kashime.com.
  5. Japan, Accessible (2 May 2017). "Fashion, art, and disability - An Interview with Mari Katayama". Accessible Japan.
  6. "森美術館の展覧会「六本木クロッシング2016展：僕の身体、あなたの声」 2016年3月26日（土）－7月10日（日）". 森美術館 (in Japanese).
  7. "Mari Katayama". University of Michigan Museum of Art.
  8. Cohen, Alina (27 May 2019). "In Opulent Self-Portraits, Mari Katayama Rejects Standard Beauty Norms". Artsy. Retrieved 3 July 2020.
  9. "Biennale Arte 2019: Mari Katayama". La Biennale di Venezia. 15 May 2019. Retrieved 13 August 2020.
  10. "Mari Katayama - White Rainbow". White Rainbow. 24 January 2019. Retrieved 3 July 2020.
  11. "Fashion, art, and disability - An Interview with Mari Katayama". Accessible Japan. 2 May 2017. Retrieved 2 July 2020.
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