Unnamed

This work examines the social structures through which idealised images of women, formed and circulated under patriarchal values, have erased individuality while shaping women’s bodies and behaviours within urban space.

From the 1970s to the early 2000s, advertisements known as pink flyers promoting sexual services circulated widely throughout Japan. Yet the images of women contained in these advertisements did not remain confined to the advertisements themselves. Repeatedly circulated categories became frameworks through which women’s bodies were recognised and assigned value, gradually influencing how women understood and performed their own bodies in everyday life. This work asks how the traces of these representations continue to accumulate within contemporary society.

The flyers were filled with labels such as “college student,” “housewife,” and “young.” These categories did not represent individuals; rather, they functioned as signs that determined how women’s bodies were valued, categorised, and commodified. Women’s bodies came to be read through these categories and circulated as particular images.

In this work, both the female forms and the categories taken from these historical pink flyers have been reconstructed in fragile ceramic. Transforming figures that had been flattened into printed images and reduced to signs into three-dimensional forms gives material presence to bodies that once belonged to real individuals. At the same time, the work invites viewers to reconsider the social structures through which individuality has been rendered invisible, while questioning how signs shape the body and how their traces continue to persist in the present.