"Different countries, different eras—but they are the same."
Asano Miyabi began with an admiration for the beautiful women depicted in Western painting. The nudes of Titian and Palma il Vecchio. Yet many of their models were courtesans. The one who depicts and the one depicted; the one who looks and the one looked at. Asano connects the asymmetry of the gaze—long sanitized by art history as "high art"—to the contemporary sex industry. Through sustained dialogue with sex workers, she paints them in the same compositions as the masterpieces. Mythological signs are replaced with economic ones. Cupid's arrow becomes ten-thousand-yen notes; a spring flower becomes a condom.
What drives Asano's practice is not theory but mischief and anger. Seeing sex workers appraised through anonymous reviews posted from the safety of concealment, she felt the impulse to "strike back at the ones who buy." In her installation Thank You, December 31st, smartphones are placed inside camisoles borrowed from sex workers, requiring viewers to lift them. Made accomplices in voyeurism, viewers are confronted with the position of their own gaze.
"I'm a slave to lookism," Asano admits. She is not free from the desire to paint beautiful women. She is also aware that her relationship with her models can never be fully equal. Embracing this contradiction, she remains within the structure and subverts it from inside. Those who face Asano's work will find themselves experiencing discomfort—and the unmistakable sensation of having been had.
