伊島薫

Izima Kaoru

Landscapes with a Corpse

Izima Kaoru (*1954 in Kyoto). Lives and works in Tokyo.

Izima Kaoru has been working with photography, video, and film since the late nineteen-seventies. He has worked for a variety of magazines and has been publishing his own magazine, zyappu, since 1994.

“The death of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world,” wrote Edgar Allan Poe. And one is tempted to be of the same opinion when considering Ophelia, Madame Bovary, or Anna Karenina. This concept is also deeply rooted in Far Eastern culture: Buddhism even recommends daily meditation on one’s own death.

The Japanese artist Izima Kaoru (*1954 in Kyoto) lets the most beautiful of the beautiful generate ideas about their own impermanence, about their own death, which he then translates into images. Starting with classic and strict landscape photographs, his highly aesthetic images slowly approach the victims of self-inflicted or external violence—right down to detailed close-ups of their faces—who have experienced death in perfect beauty. His visual sources range from traditional Japanese Ukiyo-e woodcuts to Pop Art—and the results are always characterized by a bewitching, melancholic beauty and sadness.

Among the blossoming bushes of an overgrown park, Itaya Yuka, a famous Japanese actress, lies on the naked ground. Her red dress stands out among the lilac colored hydrangeas; a couple of fallen petals decorate her throat. In Hanakotoba, the Japanese “language” of plants, the hydrangea is traditionally considered a symbol of pride—has the beauty’s pride doomed her, perhaps? In the wild Garden of Eden, the hydrangea, which, after all, originally comes from Japan, seems as strange and exotic as the beautiful dead woman.