This portrait is of Kim Manri from Women of Japan. She is the director of Taihen, a disability dance company based in Osaka. It was shot in her studio in the space from which she directs her company.
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Taihen’s work is remarkable. This is a group of performance photos taken in Jakarta, Indonesia in 2008.
These are Kim Manri’s words from Women of Japan:
The human body keeps changing all the time and can expand its possibilities infinitely.
Art should not be displayed, but should be what people living today need for their lives. So even if it is old, it must be infused with the breath of living now. In this sense, the human body is the highest art.
Human beings have a dual cosmos inside themselves. One is invisible: spirituality; and the other is material: physicality. Physical art for me is trying to confront and look at the dual cosmos of these human beings through bodies.
Physicality is needed to connect and integrate with the cosmos. The soul desires it and performs it as art. This is where I find the strong determination works. Art is created by the will of the cosmos.
In the process of clarifying my method of creation and reconsidering the process I engage in, I find art.