“Capturing nudity with a surreal touch with a wig master Tomihiro Kono’s fingerwave hair pieces of art, this book is made inspired by the word of Japanese pornography ‘hair nude’, a nude photograph showing pubic hair that once became popular back in the 80s-90s. However this book doesn’t contain any photography with public hair showing, instead Tomihiro Kono creates surreal hair finger wave pieces and place them on the body, which has changed the notion of hair nude.
Firstly she launches a book that is work-in-progress, which reflects her random thoughts in the process of book-editing. As a result, each cover has a unique design, some of the inside pages are hand-painted by artist herself.
New York-based artist Sayaka Maruyama (b.1983) is a multi-disciplinary artist who translates her notions of beauty into photography, drawings, books, and short films. "Life as a whole is a collective box of emotional experiences.
She first published ‘memorandom 0’ in 2019, compiling her work between 2011-2019, including photography, drawings, paintings, collages, objects and extracted images from her short films.
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As you leaf through this new volume by Japanese photographer, artist and filmmaker, painter and illustrator Sayaka Maruyama, consider not just the lilies, but also daisies, daffodils and dandelions, lilies and lotuses, periwinkles, primroses and peonies. Consider flowers in general. Then consider anatomy and the human body. In this new volume, the second after “memorandom 00”, Sayaka Maruyama combined indeed these two inspirations for a series of nude images in which the body is conceived as a flower, a part of nature and of the environment.
Memorandom 00 was an experimental platform and a way to take stock, collect and examine a selection of works - ideas, thoughts, memos, doodles, sketches, intuitive photography and inspiring quotes - produced over several years while living in London and New York, while providing readers with a personal insight into her working process.
This follow-up - entitled memorandom 01: Floral Beings - marks instead a new direction for Maruyama. The book mainly features photographs and illustrations inspired by a floral theme and could be considered as an exploration of bodies as flowers in bloom. Maruyama composed, styled and took the pictures, using one main accessory - wigs and partial wigs by Japanese hair artist, head prop designer and wig maker Tomihiro Kono.
Maruyama opted for Tomihiro Kono’s sculpted finger waves in a variety of bold colours and in styles reminiscent of those donned by 1920s glamorous icons such as Josephine Baker, Anita Page and Bette Davis. The artist styled these elements in ingenious ways to make them look like flowers or aquatic plants like curly-leaf pondweed. These elements sensually bloom on diaphanous skin and on radiant bodies that at times look like classical marble statues.” - Konomad