Mari Katayama finds progress in repetition

Mari Katayama has spent years putting herself in front of the camera. Her photographs surround her with handmade sculptures, textiles and mirrors, turning her body into one element in complex, surreal compositions. It would be easy to call the work self-portraiture. Katayama would rather have you look beyond the body.

Her recent “tree of life” (2024-25) series offers one example. Katayama builds elaborate, almost otherworldly environments in which she appears among hand-stitched forms, gauzy garlands called “koilia” (after the Greek word for “stomach” and “inner feelings”) and other props, including tree branches and a fake crocodile head. Multiple mirrors fracture and repeat the scene, making Katayama’s body appear to multiply within a dense world of fabric, foliage and fantastical forms. 

“Until now, my work has focused on the relationship between ‘you’ and ‘me’: between me and objects, me and my own body, me and society, me and institutions,” the 39-year-old artist says. “While building those kinds of relationships, I realized that I needed to think about the very stage, or structural system, that ‘me’ and whoever that ‘someone’ is are standing on.”

A close-up of one of Mari Katayama's hand-stitched creations. | ANNA PETEK

Katayama’s work has been shown in recent years at museums and galleries such as the Tate Modern and the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Photography Centre in London, Galerie Suzanne Tarasieve in Paris and Yutaka Kikutake Gallery in Tokyo. As the winner of the inaugural Mori Art Award, she will also exhibit her work at Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum from Oct. 31 through March 28, 2027. 

Katayama sat down for an interview with The Japan Times at the Mori Art Museum last month before inviting us to her studio in Gunma Prefecture. Cutting a chic figure with a blunt bob, Sub Pop Records T-shirt and leg prostheses painted with fern-like designs, she gamely discussed winning the award, the influences behind her work and her experiences confronting prejudice in the art world.

Given the international exposure her art has received, Katayama chose to use part of the Mori Art Award — which, at ¥10 million ($62,800), is among the largest cash prizes in the Japanese contemporary art world — to study English and travel abroad. 

“Winning this prize made me realize what I want to do and what I need,” she says. “It felt like a lid on what I’d been keeping closed suddenly popped wide open.”

Mari Katayama works with materials and objects that are readily accessible, hoping to show others that they, too, can create art. | ANNA PETEK

Her upcoming show at the Mori Art Museum will present not only photographs but also sewn sculptures from the “tree of life” series that have not been shown publicly before. “Rather than simply placing items on display,” she says, “I want to use them to create a space that feels like an installation.” 

Born in Saitama Prefecture and now based in Gunma, Katayama has been creating hand-sewn objects since childhood. She launched an artistic career encompassing photography, textiles and fashion and has also performed as a singer in a jazz bar. She holds a master’s degree in intermedia art from Tokyo University of the Arts and received the prestigious Kimura Ihei Award for photography in 2020.

Her previous works include a 2016 trilogy comprised of the series “shadow puppet” (self-portraits with sewn objects featuring her hand and its versatility), “bystander” (a group of photographs that use images of the bodies of people in Naoshima as material and subject, along with artist’s own self-portraits) and “on the way home” (shots documenting herself in her hometown with her many-limbed sewn creations). Katayama is also known for the High Heel Project, which creates prosthetics for high-heel shoes as an expression of sartorial choice. “Tree of life” draws on these earlier works stylistically and thematically, but Katayama is thinking about them differently.

“I wanted to think about the structure and base of things, and convey it to people in an easy-to-understand way,” she says. “While it seems like the same things are being repeated every time, each iteration is made to be slightly different. I think of that as hope.” 

The idea of progress emerging from repetition also resonates with Katayama’s experiences of gender and disability. She says that during the past 10 years, she has felt an uneasy deja vu, specifically with regards to political events and social movements.

“Ten years ago, I don’t think we could really say ‘disability art,’” she says, “but after the Olympics and Paralympics, people have ended up using the term again, drawing clear lines and treating things solely based on that (part of a person’s identity). ... We’ve returned to an era where people easily use ‘disability’ again to describe artworks.

“It’s the same with feminism. To be frank, we have to go out of our way to say ‘women’s.’ It feels like we’ve ended up back in that era again, after all this time. I wonder why.”

Katayama has also addressed these issues on social media. In an Instagram post from July 7, she wrote: “Whenever my work is introduced, it seems necessary to begin by explaining my body or my disability. And once that’s written in a caption, people start asking me about its cause while standing in front of the work.”

In person, she elaborates: “For some reason, only next to my artwork, (curators) wrote my name along with the medical name of my disability.  I wrote a post asking, ‘Does this actually explain the artwork?’ Because while everyone else gets explanations of their actual artwork, I don’t make art about my disability in the first place.”

| ANNA PETEK

Mari Katayama shows off the illustrations and images that went on to play a part in her “tree of life” series. She says she draws inspiration from the repetition, contrast and collage-like techniques she hears in experimental and club music. | ANNA PETEK

When asked about her creative inspirations, Katayama says she has no particular mission beyond using materials that anyone can easily obtain. “Through my work, I want to convey to others that they, too, can create art.” 

Nonetheless, she speaks avidly of her musical and artistic influences and her place in a long tradition of Japanese photographers. 

Among visual artists she most admires, she lists contemporary German photographer Juergen Teller, Italian modernist Amedeo Modigliani and Norwegian expressionist Edvard Munch. Musically, she draws inspiration from trailblazers such as Cole Porter and Sonic Youth.

“Porter had this way of making music where he would go back and forth between major and minor keys within a song. I’m highly influenced by that kind of beauty revealed within experimental music,” she says, adding that she also loves repetition in music. “I love club music, and Arthur Russell from New York cut-and-pasted a lot of what he recorded, making dozens of songs out of a single recording. … Since I use collage-like techniques in my work, I think I’ve been greatly influenced by it.”

As her work continues to evolve and incorporate different elements and inspirations, photography remains central to her practice. Participating in the ongoing Tokyo exhibition “I’m So Happy You Are Here,” a retrospective of postwar Japanese women behind the camera, gave her the chance to consider her place among peers and predecessors.

“I’m the youngest of the emerging artists in the show, so I feel a certain sense of responsibility, like a baton has been passed to me,” Katayama says. “The very first Japanese woman to work as a photographer, Ryu Shima, was from Gunma like me. So it feels like a fitting succession.”