New Skin

"Taking the famed scholar's ideas of blurring boundaries between a multitude of bodies – man and woman, human and animal, living and non-living beings – she [Hosokura] down boundaries in favour of hybrid organisms." – The LOVE Magazine

"Hosokura’s latest publication breaks down the rigid binaries and definitions that give shape to our conception of what it means to be human" – British Journal of Photography

Deeply affected by Donna Haraway’s writing, New Skin is Mayumi Hosokura’s proposition for a new way of thinking about identity, the body and desire. Its origin is one single, large-scale digital collage which Hosokura created using clippings from old gay magazines, statues, and found selfies, together with her own photographs — specifically choosing to use images of male figures only. Subsequently cut into 12 separate pieces the resulting fragments blur the boundaries between man and woman, human and animal, living and non-living beings; hybrid works that reimagine what it means to be human and which unsettle social conventions of desire. Drawing on feminist theory and current technological innovations, New Skin anticipates the future of the body in a time of advancing digital and bio-technologies.

“Subjectivity is multidimensional; so, therefore, is vision. The knowing self is partial in all its guises, never finished, whole, simply there and original; it is always constructed and stitched together imperfectly, and therefore able to join with another, to see together without claiming to be another” 

- Donna Haraway

“Gender is a field of structured and structuring difference, in which the tones of extreme localization, of the intimately personal and individualized body, vibrate in the same field with global high-tension emissions. Feminist embodiment, then, is not about fixed location in a reified body, female or otherwise, but about nodes in fields, inflections in orientations, and responsibility for difference in material-semiotic fields of meaning”. - Donna Haraway