emi anrakuji
balloon position
Emi Anrakuji
Emi Anrakuji was born in Tokyo, Japan. She studied oil painting at Musashino Art University in Tokyo. Soon after her graduation, she was diagnosed with a cerebral tumor which caused a severe degradation of her eyesight. The illness forced her to abandon her aspiration to become a professional painter. In the course of a deca- de-long recovery, one day she discovered that a camera can be a replacement of her eyes then began teaching herself photography at her hospital bed. Anrakuji’s obsession with the human body is a result, in part, from her long periods spent ho- spitalized.
Born in Tokyo in 1963, Emi Anrakuji represents herself as an alchemist of ima- ges and a catalyst for daydreams and desires. Her deeply personal work blurs the boundaries between documentary and staged photography. Posing naked, clothed, or partially dressed, Anrakuji takes a uniquely obsessive interest in her own body.
“ Emi Anrakuji’s Balloon Position, through a Cyclopean gaze, literally the artist’s vision, impaired by suffering a brain tumour, attempts to reconstruct the shatte- red self that was suspended between conflicting internal and external chaos.
Life near death, eternal rainfall, the artist gives herself to the construction of a handmade book. Balloon Position is an appropriation, a facsimile of that dummy, a document of a document.
Anrakuji is a medium, a photographic shaman, seeking in her enquiries – throu- gh literary, poetical, philosophical references – to present what we love and fear. These images were made twenty years ago.
About Balloon Position
“I had avoided speaking about the balloon position series.
That is because it embodies “life” and “death” itself for all things.
Death, which seeps in without discrimination, either creeping in silently or arriving suddenly.
Or joy, sorrow, absurdity—those commonplace emotions and the remnants of memories.
The endless emergence of life and death, labor and pleasure, winding on and on. They repeat ceaselessly, forming an unending flow.
All these phenomena are, to me, balloons —a symbol.
I firmly believe that the balance of pleasure and pain in all existence can bring har- mony to the workings of the world.
These two theses, pleasure and pain, are like a Möbius strip.
As an addendum, I hold deep reverence for the magic of photography—a medium capable of instantly capturing all the passions and impermanence of the world.”