As featured on Fantom 03 / Spring 2011

Her work is a mix of performance, sculpture, photography, Pop and Surrealism. Her process usually starts when she finds beautiful bugs in her garden or things like vegetables, flowers and other organic materials at the market. These are the basic subjects for the installations she prepares and then photographs.
“I take pictures of my sets because of my desire to see the scene and every detail in a much larger scale. I want to be ‘inside of it’, literally… Another reason is preservation. I am fascinated by the texture of the living things. They will be dead soon, but can look fresh forever on a photograph”. And what about the balance she always finds between life and death? “In my view, death and decay are not dark, desperate elements. Death is part of the natural cycle and all living things will go back to the ground. So, joy, death and decay are not something I need to balance. They are all aspects of life, equal elements in my photography”.
Yumiko Utsu was born in 1978 in Tokyo, where she currently lives. Her work gained high reputation on the occasion of Paris Photo 2008. Utsu’s first monograph, Out of the Ark, has just been released by Artbeat Publishers.