Instagram @tokyo_rumando
Tokyo Rumando
JAPAN
Tokyo Rumando is a Japanese photographer known for her provocative exploration of identity, memory, and self-performance. Born in Tokyo, she began her career as a model and actress, influences that shape her photographic work.
Rumando’s photography is bold, surreal, and often autobiographical, with a focus on self-portraiture. Her work frequently features mirrors and reflections, symbolizing the fragmented nature of identity. Notably, her ‘Orphée’ series delves into the duality of the self, using mirrors to explore her past and present.
Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum and Rencontres d'Arles. Tokyo Rumando remains a significant figure in contemporary photography, known for challenging conventional representations of identity.
In collaboration with Gallery Echo 119
• SERIES •
Orphée
Most of Tokyo Rumando’s images are staged self-portraits, like a succession of performances she conducts in front of the camera to question her identity. The plurality of her personas forms the common thread of her work. In the series Orphée (2014), the artist draws from her own fantasies and those of others to stage and transform herself throughout the images. Reflected in a mirror, her thousand faces blur the line between fiction and reality, allowing her to play with the viewers’ perception while exploring the many facets of her identity.
In her ongoing new series Visible/Invisible Memories (2023–), some images of which are presented here, Tokyo Rumando examines the potential of the image as a means of awakening memory and transcending past traumas. She creates works that blend collective and personal experiences, forming a body of work that speaks to the condition of women in Japan, transcending time periods. In resonance, cyanotypes on glass blur and transform past memories by tinting them with a blue veil. The artist thus weaves a series with "blues" undertones, in which she dives to intimately question herself.
