[Character] Unique self, ordinary self: Truth Katayama

Most people want to be a unique person, but the artist Maru Katayama has longed to be an ordinary person since he was a child, with ordinary hands and legs, standing in an ordinary posture, and walking in an ordinary posture.

The 33-year-old Katayama Marri was born with a lack of shin bones, his feet were severely curved inward, and his left hand only had two fingers. Due to the difference in appearance, he was often bullied when he was young. Her feet could not support her body. In order to walk alone, she had to put on aids from her thighs to the soles of her feet when she was a child, and her steps were crooked and stiff. In order to make herself look "ordinary", she worked hard to learn the way of passers-by. The gait is still not ideal. What bothered her the most about her physical defects was the inability to put on beautiful high heels on her feet. When she was nine years old, when the doctor asked her if she wanted to amputate her feet to put on prosthetics, she was so young. Resolutely agreed.

It has been more than ten or twenty years since her legs were separated from her, but the feeling of the existence of her legs is still deeply etched in Katayama's memory. His legs were itchy, and when he reached out to scratch, he suddenly remembered that they were gone. What he stepped on was a hard and cold prosthesis. What would the legs look like if they were still growing on them? When Katayama was in doubt, he fashioned a pair of severed limbs for himself, put them on his legs that had contracted his muscles, and took frame after frame of selfies for himself.

Katayama Maru's 2013 photo series "Smoking Area" shows her naked under the covers; she tucks herself into the slits of a cardboard box, stretching her mutilated feet; in a cluttered room She was lying beside her with her prosthetic limb; she sat on the floor half-naked, with socks on the prosthetic limb behind her... Every photo has something in common, that is, she in it, with a cigarette between her fingers. Katayama's various series of photos are so real that many people think that she is the real her after seeing it, and she is naked and naked before the viewers. But this is not the case. The seemingly real home environment in the photo is actually a meticulously housed one. Even the location of each cardboard box was determined after careful calculation. In these false living spaces, she plays herself.

"'Ms. Katayama is very hardworking. Although her legs are prosthetic, she is often bullied, and she is still working hard in the face of all kinds of pain.' I am often packaged as such 'Mr. Katayama'. Compared with ordinary people, it is possible It’s been a bit more difficult, but for me it’s just helpless, and I don’t want to appear ‘very hard’.” In an interview, Katayama Maru mentioned how she feels when facing other people’s misunderstandings about herself, which is getting more and more attention. At the same time, the misunderstanding deepened, and later, even she herself pretended to be strong, and carefully managed the role of Katayama truth to ensure that the part of herself that she did not want to expose would not be leaked.

"In fact, everyone is playing the role they set. In the company and at home, they are completely different. They face different friends and show different faces." Then, what is the real self like? Woolen cloth? In 2015, she published the work "You're Mine", which contains three herself - one is made of plaster, and is the size of Katayama truth, and even the fingerprints are carefully copied, but the face is a mirror, Whoever puts the face together, it becomes whoever it is, symbolizing Katayama truth stealing the characteristics of everyone. The other self is shown in the photo, dressed in bright clothes, with a delicate posture, symbolizing that Katayama truth has absorbed the characteristics of everyone and pieced together into a "superficial self". The last one is the most real, reflected in the full-body mirror, that is the current self. A person, so many facets, each one is the true self.

Katayama has tried to imitate others since he was a child, pretending to be the self expected by others, in order to become similar to others, he suffered a lot in his heart, but in the end he found that this behavior turned out to be normal. "In order to survive in society smoothly, anyone will learn from others, how to behave in what kind of situation; how to do it so as not to be hated. Everyone steals traits from others, and then makes "self" ’, and this is the same as me who has come along the way.”