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We present Mario A., "ma poupee japonaise", a photo installation. Starting on July 25 and closing on August 25. Mario A. is an Italo-German artist living in Tokyo and Berlin, and is renowned for his unique and provocative approach towards the Japanese culture.

This exhibition is held to commemorate the publishing of his new book under the same title. For the book, he collaborated with Sachiko Hara who is known as a leading actress of the avantgarde theater troupe ROMANTICA until 1998. Further more, Masahiko Shimada, a most distinctive cult author as well as an important literary voice of the younger generation of Japanese novelists, contributed his new text,"Sachiko".

Mario A.'s monochrome photographs depict his wonder and admiration for Japanese modern women, in ecstasy wrapping herselves up in a beauty which is similar to death and yet gives off a living-spirit. "My mental weak point is Japanese women. I love Japanese women.They are my ruin. Before I perish, let me savor them like a gourmet. Let me dance" The Last Tango in Tokyo" with them."

It took narcisstic Sachiko Hara and Mario A. over one year to create this immortal doll. "I always wanted to create a Japanese woman doll which I can look at in "the night-porter"-picturesque way. Sachiko-oxymoron should remind me of the dualities like attraction-repulsion, reality-unreality, hypertrophied feminity-icon fixation". So he happily found an allegorical "creature" in Sachiko Hara who possessed parts of such important, long ago deceased, women artists like futurist Valentine Saint-Point, Dadaists Emmy Hennings or Hannah Hoch, surrealist Claude Cauhun or art-performer as well as the lover of Marcel Duchamp, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven.

With this provocative, mysterious, or subversive content, he challenges our reception about trivializing the doll world.

For recent years, he has flown back and forth between Tokyo and Berlin. His gaze during these fieldworks are excellently reflected in his works.

---A man sets out on a journey with his suitcase which he found at an antique shop in Berlin, packing with his "ideal-idol" Sachiko. She is sitting in a cafe, in a department store's window,lying down in a Japanese inn, wearing various clothes and sometimes she is naked. She changes her pose following the man's desire. The artist picked up these scenes and mysteriouly visualized the admiration for the mignon and even enjoyed playing with cultural motivated stereotypes of Japanese women. For this exhibition, he made an additional installation with Japanese teen's erotic pictorials which are now forbidden to print . We are also planning some other events relevant to the exhibition.


A part of these "Nabokov-like"works toured around artfairs in Europe and NY, and got great reputations. The exhibition "ma poupee japonaise" was confirmed to be held at a gallery in Berlin this autumn. It will never dissapoint the audience there and keep on attracting people around the world. Will Mario A. have to escape Berlin like his predecessor," the man with the suitcase", Hans Bellmer? Take asylum in Southern France with like-minded artist, Max Ernst 57 years ago? Or will Mario A. hide into the inner immigration, in his Berlin coal cellar and talk to his doll:"piccola e fragile bambola..."?

installation view