Part of a generation of young Japanese photographers, Yumiko Utsu’s images present the fantastical and uncanny. Utsu uses food graphically and gratuitously to consider its aesthetic properties; her work is inspired by the imaginary worlds of Hieronymus Bosch, Salvador Dali, and the Czech filmmaker Jan Švankmajer’s, whose surreal animations are particularly humorous and lusciously multisensorial. In a nod to these surrealist forbearers, Octopus Portrait, 2009, is similarly textured and vaguely unsettling. The artist has taken what appears to be a 19th-century portrait of a woman posed jauntily within a sumptuous interior of velvet and brocade, and replaced her face with a fleshy octopus. Utsu’s creature is bent on domination, its tentacles curl confidently and sinisterly outwards, forming phantom eyes on the woman’s face, as it slowly engulfs its prey.
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