Sudo Ayano captures her subjects with a desire to transform that transcends gender. Her highly idealized images seem to fit in the space between shojo manga and photography. In her early years, Sudo added designs and decorations digitally to her photos and after printing, she would apply rhinestones and glitter. Her goal was to photographically recreate the world as she and her subjects saw it. Since Gespenster, her 2013 series that centered around girls who went missing, her works have expanded on this theme of going between imaginary worlds and reality.

Vita Machinicalis, Sudo’s series of photographs of human subjects as androids, explores the delicate beauty that wavers between the virtual and real. Her inspiration for the series came in 2018 before the COVID pandemic when she was walking down the deserted city streets of Tokyo in the dead of night. She felt an eeriness to the high-rise buildings and futuristic architecture that seemed not like homes for humans but for machines. That world, where machines live as humans do now, might not be so far in the future. When that time comes, how will we design the appearance of these machines? Currently, we can make ourselves look like dolls with photo editing software. Some even endeavor to make machines in the image of humans with computer generated imagery like digitally adding wrinkles and moles. In the present age where the desire for reality intersects with the reality we seek in the virtual, what is beauty and what is identity? Sudo’s works have the power to question our values.

In this exhibition we will reconfigure Vita Machinicalis to accommodate Sudo’s newer works.

Ayano Sudo, born in Osaka in 1986. Sudo’s photography captures her subjects with a sense of idealism and a desire for transformation that often transcends gender. The images might remind the viewer of shojo manga, comics for adolescent girls. She uses photographic printing paper with a unique texture and decorates them with rhinestones and glitter which sparkle under the lights of the exhibition space. She has exhibited her works domestically and internationally. In 2011 she won the Mio photo award given by Yasumasa Morimura. Three years later in 2014, Gesprenster, her series of self-portraits where she dressed up as missing young girls, won the Canon New Cosmos of Photography competition. In 2018 her work was featured in the group show, I know something about love, Asian Contemporary Photography at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum. She also has a photobook with the same title published by the French publisher Holoholo Books. In addition to her exhibitions, she also is active as a photographer shooting for various magazine publications.